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REBEL'S RECOLLECTIONS 



GEORGE GARY EGGLESTON 



AUTHOR OF "a man OF HONOR*' 





■:C^ Or Co^^^^^ 



en 
to 



NEW YORK 
PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON 

QTambribge: ©lie Kinersibe Press. 

1875 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1S74, by 

(iEOKGH CaKY EgGLHSTON, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



RiN'EKstuE, Cambridge: 

iTEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 
H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



30 



DEDICATION. 

I WISH to dedicate this book to my brother, 
Edward Eggleston ; and even if there were 
no motives of affection impelHng me thereto, I 
should still feel bound to inscribe his name 
upon this page, as an act of justice, in order 
that those critics who confounded me with him, 
when I put forth a little novel a year ago, may 
have no chance to hold him responsible for my 
political as they did for my literary sins. 



PREFACE. 



Lunching one day with Oliver Johnson, 
the best " original abolitionist " I ever knew, 
I submitted to him the question I was de- 
bating with myself, namely, whether I might 
write this little volume of reminiscences 
without fear of offending excellent people, 
or, still worse, reanimating prejudices that 
happily were dying. His reply was, " Write, 
by all means. Prejudice is the first-born of 
ignorance, and it never outlives its father. 
The only thing necessary now to the final 
burial of the animosity existing between the 
sections is that the North and the South 
shall learn to know and understand each 
other. Anything which contributes to this 
hastens the day of peace and harmony and 
brotherly love which every good man longs 
for." 



vi Preface, 

Upon this hint I have written, and if the 
reading of these pages shall serve, in never 
so small a degree, to strengthen the kindly 
feelings which have grown up of late be- 
tween the foemen of ten years ago, I shall 
think my labor well expended. 

I have written chiefly of the things I saw 
for myself, and yet this is in no sense the 
story of my personal adventures. I never 
wore a star on my collar, and every reader 
of military novels knows that adventures 
worth writing about never befall a soldier 
below the rank of major. 

G. C. E. 
October^ 1874. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. The Mustering i 

II. The Men who made the Army . 29 

III. The Temper of the Women . . 56 

IV. Of the Time when Money was 

"Easy" 77 

V. The Chevalier of the Lost Cause . 108 
VI. Lee, Jackson, and some Lesser Wor- 
thies 138 

VII. Some Queer People . . . 169 

VIIL Red Tape 193 

IX. The End, and After . . . 229 



A REBEL'S RECOLLECTIONS. 



CHAPTER I. 



THE MUSTERING. 



That was an admirable idea of De Qiiin- 
cey's, formally to postulate any startling 
theory upon which he desired to build an 
argument or a story, and to insist that 
his readers should regard the postulate as 
proved, on pain of losing altogether what 
he had to say. The plan is a very con- 
venient one, saving a deal of argument, and 
establishing in the outset a very desirable 
relation of- mastery and subordination be- 
tween writer and reader. Indeed, but for 
some such device I should never be able 
to get on at all with these sketches, fully 
to understand which, the reader must make 
of himself, for the time at least, a Confeder- 



2 A Rebel's Recollections. 

ate. He must put himself in the place of 
the Southerners and look at some things 
through their eyes, if he would understand 
those things and their results at all ; and 
as it is no part of my purpose to write a 
defense of the Southern view of any ques- 
tion, it will save a good deal of explanation 
on my part, and weariness on the part of 
the reader, if I follow De Ouincey's exam- 
ple and do a little postulating to begin with. 
I shall make no attempt whatever to prove 
my postulates, but any one interested in 
these pages will find it to his advantage to 
accept them, one and all, as proved, pend- 
ing the reading of what is to follow. After 
that he may relapse as speedily as he pleases 
into his own opinions. Here are the postu- 
lates : — 

I. The Southerners honestly believed in 
the right of secession, not merely as a rev- 
olutionary, but as a constitutional right. 
They not only held that whenever any peo- 
ple finds the government under which it is 



The Mustering, 3 

living oppressive and subversive of the ends 
for which it was instituted, it is both the 
right and the duty of that people to throw 
off the government and estabUsh a new one 
in its stead ; but they believed also that 
every State in the Union held the reserved 
right, under the constitution, to withdraw 
peaceably from the Union at pleasure. 

2. They believed that every man's alle- 
giance was due to his State only, and that 
it was only by virtue of the State's con- 
tinuance in the Union that any allegiance 
was due to the general government at all ; 
wherefore the withdrawal of a State from, 
the Union would of itself absolve all the 
citizens of that State from whatever obliga- 
tions they were under to maintain and re- 
spect the Federal constitution. In other 
words, patriotism, as the South understood 
it, meant devotion to one's State, and only 
a secondary and consequen.tiaL dievotion- to 
the Union, existing as a result of the State's 
action in making itself a part of the Union, 



4 A Rebel's Recollections. 

and terminable at any time by the State's 
withdrawal. 

3. They were as truly and purely patri- 
otic in their . secession and in the fighting 
which followed, as were the people of the 
North in their adherence to the Union it- 
self. The difference was one of opinion as 
to what the duties of a patriot were, and 
not at all a difference in the degree of pa- 
triotism existing in the two sections. 

4. You, reader, who shouldered your 
musket and fought like the hero you are, 
ior the Union and the old flag, if you had 
been bred at the South, and had under- 
stood your duty as the Southerners did 
theirs, would have fought quite as bravely 
for secession as you did against it ; and you 
would have been quite as truly a hero in 
the one case as in the other, because in 
either you would have risked your life for 
the sake of that which you held to be the 
right. If the reader will bear all this in 
mind we shall get on much better than we 



The Mustering, 5 

otherwise could, in our effort to catch a 
glimpse of the war from a Southern point 
of view. 

With all its horrors and in spite of the 
wretchedness it has wrought, this war of 
ours, in some of its aspects at least, begins 
to look like a very ridiculous affair, now that 
we are getting too far away from it to hear 
the rattle of the musketry ; and I have a 
mind, in this chapter, to review one of its 
most ridiculous phases, to wit, its beginning. 
We all remember Mr. Webster's pithy put- 
ting of the case with regard to our fore- 
fathers of a hundred years ago : " They 
went to war against a preamble. They 
fought seven years against a declaration. 
They poured out their treasures and their 
blood like water, in a contest in opposition 
to an assertion." Now it seems to me that 
something very much like this might be 
said of the Southerners, and particularly of 
the Virginians, without whose pluck and 
pith there could have been no war at all 



6 A Redel's Recollections. 

worth writing or talking about. They made 
war upon a catch-word, and fought until 
they were hopelessly ruined for the sake of 
an abstraction. And certainly history will 
not find it to the discredit of those people 
that they freely offered themselves upon the 
altar of an abstract principle of right, in a 
war which they knew must work hopeless 
ruin to themselves, whatever its other re- 
sults might be. Virginia did not want to 
secede, and her decision to this effect was 
given in the election of a convention com- 
posed for the most part of men strongly 
opposed to secession. The Virginians be- 
lieved they had both a moral and a consti- 
tutional right to withdraw voluntarily from 
a Union into which they had voluntaril)^ 
gone, but the majority of them preferred to 
remain as they were. They did not feel 
themselves particularly aggrieved or threat- 
ened by the election of Mr. Lincoln, and so, 
while they never doubted that they had an 
unquestionable right to secede at will, they 



The Mustering, 7 

decided by their votes not to do anything 
of the kind. This decision was given in the 
most unmistakable way, by heavy majori- 
ties, in an election which involved no other 
issue whatever. But without Virginia the 
States which had already passed ordinances 
of secession would have been wholly unable 
to sustain themselves. Virginia's strength 
in men, material, and geographical position 
was very necessary, for one thing, and her 
moral influence on North Carolina, Arkan- 
sas, and other hesitating States, was even 
more essential to the success of the move- 
ment. Accordingly every possible effort 
was made to " fire the heart " of the con- 
servative old commonwealth. Delegations, 
ith ponderous stump speeches in their 
mouths and parchment appeals in their 
hands, were sent from the seceding States 
to Richmond, while every Virginian who 
actively favored secession was constituted 
a committee of one to cultivate a public 
sentiment in favor of the movement. 



8 A Rebel's Recollections. 

Then came such a deluge of stump 
speeches as would have been impossible in 
any other state or country in the civilized 
world, for there never yet was a Virginian 
who could not, on occasion, acquit himself 
very well on the hustings. The process of 
getting up the requisite amount of enthusi- 
asm, in the country districts especially, was 
in many cases a very laughable one. In one 
county, I remember, the principal speakers 
were three lawyers of no very great weight 
except in a time of excitement. One of 
them was colonel of the county militia, 
another lieutenant-colonel, and the third 
captain of a troop of volunteer cavalry, a 
fine body of men, who spent three or four 
days of each month partly in practicing a 
system of drill which, I am persuaded, is 
as yet wholly undreamed of by any of the 
writers upon tactics, and partly in cultivat- 
ing the social virtues over that peculiar spe- 
cies of feast known as a barbecue. When 
it became evident that the people of Vir- 



The Mustering, 9 

ginia were not duly impressed with the 
wrong done them in the election of Mr. 
Lincoln, these were unquestionably the 
right men in the right places. They were 
especially fond of fervid speech-making, and 
not one of them had ever been known to 
neglect an opportunity to practice it ; each 
could make a speech on any subject at a 
moment's warning. They spoke quite as 
well on a poor theme as on a good one, and 
it was even claimed for one of them that his 
eloquence waxed hottest when he had no 
subject at all to talk about. Here, then, was 
their opportunity. The ever-full vials of 
their eloquence waited only for the uncork- 
ing. It was the rule of their lives to make 
a speech wherever and whenever they could 
get an audience, and under the militia law 
they could, at will, compel the attendance 
of a body of hsteners consisting of pretty 
nearly all the voters of the county, plus the 
small boys. When they were big with 
speech they had only to order a drill. If a 



lo A RebeVs Recollections. 

new gush of words or a felicitous illustra- 
tion occurred to them overnight, they called 
a general muster for the next day. Two of 
them were candidates, against a quiet and 
sensible planter, for the one seat allowed the^ 
county in the convention, and the only dif- 
ference of opinion there was between them 
was involved in the question whether the 
ordinance of secession should be adopted 
•before or after breakfast on the morning of 
the first day of the convention's existence. 
•One wanted coffee first and the other did 
•not. On the day of election, a drunken fel- 
low, without a thought of saying a good 
thing, apologized to one of them for not 
having voted for him, saying, " I promised 
you, Sam, — but I could n't do it. You 're 
a good fellow, Sam, and smart at a speech, 
but you see, Sam, you have 71 1 the zveight 
^' heady The people, as the result of the 
•election showed, entertained a like view of 
the matter, and the lawyers were both 
b)eaten by the old planter. 



The Mustering. ii 

It was not until after the convention as- 
sembled, however, that the eloquence of the 
triad came into full play. They then la- 
bored unceasingly to find words with which 
to express their humiliation in view of the 
degeneracy and cowardice of the ancient 
commonwealth. 

^They rejoiced in the thought that sooner 
or later the People — which they always 
pronounced with an uncommonly big P — 
would " hurl those degenerate sons of illus- 
trious sires," meaning thereby the gentle- 
men who had been elected to the conven- 
tion, " from the seats which they were now 
polluting," and a good deal more of a simi- 
lar sort, the point of which was that these 
orators longed for war of the bloodiest kind, 
and were happy in the beUef that it would 
come, in spite of the fact that the conven- 
tion was overwhelmingly against secession. 
Now, in view of the subsequent history 
of these belligerent orators, it would be a 
very interesting thing to know just what 



12 A Rebel's Recollections. 

they thought a war between the sections 
promised. One of them, as I have said, 
was colonel of the two or three hundred 
militia-men mustered in the county. An- 
other was lieutenant-colonel, and the tlyrd 
was captain of a volunteer troop, organized 
under the militia: law for purposes of amuse- 
ment, chiefly. This last one could, of 
course, retain his rank, should his company 
be mustered into service, and the other two 
firmly believed that they would be called 
into camp as full-fledged field-officers. In 
view of this, the colonel, in one of his 
speeches, urged upon his men the necessity 
of a rigid self-examination, touching the 
matter of personal courage, before going, in 
his regiment, to the battle-field ; " For," 
said he, " where G. leads, brave men must 
follow," a bit of rhetoric which brought 
down the house as a matter of course. 
The others were equally valiant in anticipa- 
tion of war and equally eager for its com- 
ing ; and yet when the war did come, so 



The Mustering. 13 

sorely taxing the resources of the South as 
to make a levy en masse necessary, not one 
of the three ever managed to hear the 
whistle of a bullet. The colonel did indeed 
go as far as Richmond, during the spring 
of 1 86 1, but discovering there that he was 
physically unfit for service, went no farther. 
The lieutenant-colonel ran away from the 
field while the battle was yet afar off, and 
the captain, suffering from " nervous pros- 
tration," sent in his resignation, which was 
unanimously accepted by his men, on the 
field during the first battle of Bull Run. 

I sketch these three men and their mili- 
tary careers not without a purpose. They 
serve to correct an error. They were types 
of a class which brought upon the South a 
deal of odium. Noisy speech-makers, they 
were too often believed by strangers to be, 
as they pretended, representative men, and 
their bragging, their intolerance, their con- 
tempt for the North, their arrogance, — all 
these were commonly laid to the charge of 



14 A RebeVs Recollections, 

the Southern people as a whole. As a 
matter of fact, these were not representa- 
tive men at all. They assumed the role of 
leadership on the court-house greens, but 
were repudiated by the people at the polls 
first, and afterwards when the volunteers 
were choosing officers to command them in 
actual warfare. These men were clamorous 
demagogues and nothing else. They had 
no influence whatever upon the real peo- 
ple. Their vaporings were applauded and 
laughed at. The applause was ridicule, and 
the laughter was closely akin to jeering. 

Meantime a terrible dread was brooding 
over the minds of the Virginian people. 
They were brave men and patriots, who 
would maintain their honor at any cost. 
They were ready to sacrifice their lives and 
their treasures in a hopeless struggle about 
an abstraction, should the time come when 
their sense of right and honor required the 
sacrifice at their hands. There was no 
cowardice and no hesitation to be expected 



The Mustering, 15 

of them when the call should come. But 
they dreaded war, and most of them prayed 
that it might never be. They saw only 
desolation in its face. They knew it would 
lay waste their fields and bring want upon 
their families, however it might result in 
regard to the great political questions in- 
volved in it. And so they refused to go 
headlong into a war which meant for them 
destruction. Some of them, believing that 
there was no possibihty of avoiding the 
struggle, thought it the part of wisdom to 
accept the inevitable and begin hostihties 
at once, while the North was still but poorly 
prepared for aggressive measures. But the 
majority of the Virginians were disposed to 
wait and to avoid war altogether, if that 
should prove possible. These said, "We 
should remain quiet until some overt act of 
hostihty shall make resistance necessary." 
And these were called cowards and fogies 
by the brave men of the hustings already 
alluded to. 



1 6 A Rebel's Recollectio7is. 

There was still another class of men who 
were opposed to secession in any case. Of 
these, William C. Wickham, of Hanover, and 
Jubal Early will serve as examples. They 
thought secession unnecessary and impru- 
dent in any conceivable event. They be- 
lieved that it offered no remedy for existing 
or possible ills, and that it could result only 
in the prostration of the South. They op- 
posed it, therefore, with all their might ; 
not only as not yet called for, but as sui- 
cidal in any event, and not to be thought of 
at all. And yet these men, when the war 
came, believed it to be their duty to side 
with their State, and fought so manfully in 
behalf of the South as to make themselves 
famous military leaders. 

Why, then, the reader doubtless asks, if 
this was the temper of the Virginians, did 
Virginia secede after all 1 I answer, be- 
cause circumstances ultimately so placed 
the Virginians that they could not, without 
cowardice and dishonor, do otherwise ; and 



The Mustering, 17 

the Virginians are brave men and honora- 
ble ones. They believed, as I have said, in 
the abstract right of any State to secede at 
will. Indeed, this right was to them as 
wholly unquestioned and unquestionable as 
is the right of the States to establish free 
schools, or to do any other thing pertain- 
ing to local self-government. The ques- 
tion of the correctness or incorrectness of 
the doctrine is not now to the purpose. 
The Virginians, almost without an excep- 
tion, believed and had always believed it 
absolutely, and believing it, they held of 
necessity that the general government had 
no right, legal or moral, to coerce a seced- 
ing State ; and so, when the President 
called upon Virginia for her quota of troops 
with which to compel the return of the se- 
ceding States, she could not possibly obey 
without doing that which her people be- 
lieved to be an outrage upon the rights of 
sister commonwealths, for which, as they 
held, there was no warrant in law or equity. 



1 8 A Rebel's Recollections, 

She heartily condemned the secession of 
South CaroHna and the rest as unnecessary, 
ill-advised, and dangerous ; but their seces- 
sion did not concern her except as a looker- 
on, and she had not only refused to be a 
partaker in it, but had also felt a good deal 
of indignation against the men who were 
thus endangering the peace of the land. 
When she was called upon to assist in re- 
ducing these States to submission, however, 
she could no longer remain a spectator. 
She must furnish the troops, and so assist 
in doing that which she believed to be ut- 
terly wrong, or she must herself withdraw 
from the Union. The question was thus 
narrowed down to this : Should Virginia 
seek safety in dishonor, or should she meet 
destruction in doing that which she be- 
lieved to be right ? Such a question was 
not long to be debated. Two days after 
the proclamation was published Virginia 
seceded, not because she wanted to secede, 
— not because she believed it wise, — but 



TJie Alustering. 19 

because, as she understood the matter, the 
only other course open to her would have 
been cowardly and dishonorable. 

Now, unless I am sadly mistaken, the 
Virginians understood what secession im- 
plied much more perfectly than did the rest 
of the Southern people. They anticipated 
no child's play, and having cast in their lot 
with the South, they began at once to get 
ready for war. From one end of the State 
to the other, every county seat became a 
drill field. The courts suspended their ses- 
sions, on the ground that it was not a 
proper time for the enforced collection of 
debts. Volunteer companies soon drained 
the militia organization of its men. Public 
opinion said that every man who did not 
embrace the very surest and earliest oppor- 
tunity of getting himself mustered into 
actual service was a coward ; and so, to 
withdraw from the militia and join a volun- 
teer company, and make a formal tender of 
services to the State, became absolutely es- 



20 A Rebel's Recollections. 

sential to the maintenance of one's reputa- 
tion as a gentleman. 

The drilUng, of which there was literally 
no end, was simply funny. Maneuvers of 
the most utterly impossible sort were care- 
fully taught to the men. Every amateur 
officer had his own pet system of tactics, 
and the effect of the incongruous teachings, 
when brought out in battalion drill, closely 
resembled that of the music at Mr. Bob 
Sawyer's party, where each guest sang the 
chorus to the tune he knew best. 

The militia colonels, having assumed a 
sort of general authority over the volunteer 
companies which had been formed out of 
the old militia material, were not satisfied 
with daily musterings of the men under 
their captains, — musterings which left the 
field-officers nothing to do, — and so in a 
good many of the counties they ordered all 
the men into camp at the county seat, and 
drew upon the people for provisions with 
which to feed them. The camps were 



The Mustering. 21 

irregular, disorderly affairs, over which no 
rod of discipline could very well be held, as 
the men were not legally soldiers, and the 
only punishment possible for disobedience 
or neglect of duty was a small fine, which 
the willful men, with true Virginian con- 
tempt for money in small sums, paid cheer- 
fully as a tax upon jollity. 

The camping, however, was enjoyable in 
itself, and as most of the men had nothing 
else to do, the attendance upon roll-call was 
a pretty full one. Every man brought a 
servant or two with him, of course. How 
else were his boots and his accouterments 
to be kept clean, his horse to be groomed, 
and his meals cooked t Most of the ladies 
came, too, in their carriages every morning, 
returning to their homes only as night 
came on ; and so the camps were very pict- 
uresque and very delightful places to be in. 
All the men wore epaulets of a gorgeous- 
ness rarely equaled except in portraits of 
field-marshals, and every man was a hero 
in immediate prospect. 



22 A Rebel's Recollections, 

One day an alarming report came, to the 
effect that a Httle transport steamer, well 
known in James River, was on her way up 
to Richmond with ten thousand troops on 
board, and instantly the camps at the court- 
houses along the railroads were astir. It 
entered into nobody's head to inquire where 
so many troops could have come from at a 
time when the entire active force of the 
United States army from Maine to Oregon 
was hardly greater than that ; nor did any- 
body seem surprised that the whole ten 
thousand had managed to bestow them- 
selves on board a steamer the carrying 
capacity of which had hitherto been about 
four or five hundred men. The report was 
accepted as true, and everybody believed 
that the ten thousand men would be poured 
into Richmond's defenseless streets within 
an hour or two. In the particular county 
to which I have alluded in the beginning 
of this chapter, the cavalry captain sent for 
half a dozen grindstones, and set his men 



The Mustering, 23 

to grinding their sabres, — a process which 
utterly ruined the blades, of course. The 
militia colonel telegraphed a stump speech 
or two to Richmond, which did no partic- 
ular harm, as the old station agent who 
officiated as operator could not for his life 
send a message of more than three words 
so that it could be read at the other end 
of the line. A little telegraphic swearing 
came back over the wires, but beyond that 
the colonel's glowing messages resulted in 
nothing. Turning his attention to matters 
more immediately within his control, there- 
fore, he ordered the drums to beat, and as- 
sembling the men he marched them boldly 
down to the railroad station, where mount- 
ing a goods box he told them that the time 
for speech-making was now past ; that the 
enemy (I am not sure that he did not say 
" vandal," and make some parenthetical re- 
marks about " Attila flags " and things of 
that sort which were favorites with him) 
was now at our very thresholds ; that he 



24 A Rebel's Recollections. 

(the colonel) had marched his command to 
the depot in answer to the call of his coun- 
try ; that they would proceed thence by 
rail to Richmond and at once encounter 
the enemy, etc., etc., etc. He had already 
telegraphed, he said, to General Lee and 
to Governor Letcher, requesting them to 
dispatch a train (the colonel would have 
scorned to say " send cars " even in a tele- 
gram), and the iron horse was doubtless 
already on its way. 

No train came, however, and after night- 
fall the men were marched back to their 
quarters in the court-house. 

A few days later some genuine orders 
came from Richmond, accepting the prof- 
fered services of all the companies organ- 
ized in the county, and ordering all, except 
the one cavalry troop, into camp at Rich- 
mond. These orders, by some strange 
oversight, the colonel explained, were ad- 
dressed, not to him as colonel, but to the 
several captains individually. He was not 



The Mustermo-, 2c 

<-> -J 

disposed to stand on ceremony, however, he 
said ; and so, without waiting for the cler- 
ical error to be rectified, he would comply 
with the spirit of the order, and take the 
troops to Richmond as soon as the neces- 
sary transportation should arrive. Trans- 
portation was a good, mouth-filhng word, 
which suited the colonel exactly. In order 
that there should be no delay or miscar- 
riage, he marched the men a hundred yards 
down the hill to the station, ten hours in 
advance of the time at which the cars were 
to be there ; and as there was nothing else 
to do, he and his heutenant thought the 
occasion a good one for the making of a 
speech apiece. The colonel expressed his 
hearty sympathy with the woes of the cav- 
alry, who were to be left at home, while the 
infantry was winning renown. And yet, he 
said, he had expected this from the first. 
The time had been, he explained, when the 
cavalry was the quick-moving arm of the 
service, but now that the iron horse — The 



2 6 A Rebel's Recollections. 

reader must imagine the rest of that gran- 
diloquent sentence. I value my reputation 
for veracity too much to risk it by follow- 
ing the colonel in this, his supreme burst of 
impassioned oratory. He was sorry for the 
cavalry, but they should console themselves 
with the thought that, as preservers of or- 
der in the community and protectors of 
their homes, they would not be wholly use- 
less in their own humble way ; and should 
any of them visit the army, they would al- 
ways meet a hearty welcome in his camp. 
For the present his head-quarters would be 
in the Spottswood Hotel, and he would be 
glad, whenever military duty did not too 
greatly absorb his attention, to grasp the 
hand of any member of the troop who, 
wishing to catch a glimpse of real warfare, 
should seek him there. 

The train came, after a while, and the 
unappreciative railroad men obstinately in- 
sisted that the State paid for the passage 
of certain designated companies only, and 



The Mustering* 27 

that these distinguished field-officers, if they 
traveled by that train at all, must pay their 
way at regular passenger rates. The colo- 
nel and his heutenant pocketed the insult 
and paid their fare; but when, upon the 
arrival of the troops at Richmond, nobody 
seemed to know anything about these field- 
officers, and the companies were sent, with- 
out them, into camps of instruction, the gal- 
lant leaders returned by passenger train to 
their homes. The colonel came back, he 
said in a speech at the station, still further 
to stir the patriotism of the people. He 
had been in consultation with the authori- 
ties in Richmond ; and while it would not 
be proper for him to reveal even to these, 
his patriotic countrymen, the full plan of 
campaign confided to him as a field-officer, 
he might at least say to them that the gov- 
ernment, within ten days, would have fif- 
teen thousand men in Une on the Potomac, 
and then, with perchance a bloody but very 
brief struggle, this overwhelming force 



28 A Rebel's Recollections. 

would dictate terms to the tyrants at 
Washington. 

This time the colonel got himself unmis- 
takably laughed at, and, so far as I have 
heard, he made no more speeches. 

Meantime it had become evident to 
everybody that a very real and a very ter- 
rible war was in prospect, and there was no 
longer any disposition to tolerate nonsense 
of the sort I have been describing. As fast 
as arrangements could be made for their 
accommodation, the volunteers from every 
part of the State were ordered into camps 
of instruction at Richmond and Ashland. 
As soon as any company was deemed fit 
for service, it was sent to the front and as- 
signed to a regiment. . Troops from other 
States were constantly pouring into Rich- 
mond, and marching thence to the armies 
which were forming in the field. The 
speech-making was over forever, and the 
work of the war had begun. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE MEN WHO MADE THE ARMY. 

A NEWSPAPER correspondent has told us 
that the great leader of the German armies, 
Count Von Moltke, has never read anything 
— even a history — of our war, and that 
when questioned on the subject, he has said 
he could not afford to spend time over " the 
wrangling of two armed mobs." If he ever 
said anything of the kind, which is doubt- 
ful, his characterization of the two armies 
had reference, probably, to their condition 
during the first year or two of the struggle, 
when they could lay very little claim in- 
deed to any more distinctively military title. 
The Southern army, at any rate, was simply 
a vast mob of rather ill-armed young gen- 
tlemen from the country .^ As I have said 

1 In order that no reader may misconceive the spirit 



30 A Rebel's Recollections, 

in a previous chapter, every gentleman in 
Virginia, not wholly incapable of rendering 
service, enlisted at the beginning of the 
war, and the companies, unarmed, untrained, 
and hardly even organized, were sent at 
once to camps of instruction. Here they 

in which this chapter is written, I wish to say, at the out- 
set, that in commenting upon the material of which the 
Southern army was made up, nothing has been further 
from my t'hought than to reflect, even by impHcation, 
upon the character of the Union army or of the men who 
composed it, for indeed I honor both as highly as any- 
body can. I think I have outlived whatever war preju- 
dices I may have brought with me out of the struggle, 
and in writing of some of the better characteristics of the 
early Virginian volunteers, I certainly have not meant 
to deny equal or like excellence to their foemen. I hap- 
pen, however, to know a great deal about the one army 
and very little about the other, — a state of things con- 
sequent upon the peculiar warmth with which we were 
always greeted whenever we undertook to visit the camps 
of our friends on the other side. Will the reader please 
bear in mind, then, that my estimate of the character of 
the Southern troops is a positive and not a comparative 
one, and that nothing said in praise of the one army is 
meant to be a reflection upon the other ? Between Bull 
Run and Appomattox I had ample opportunity to learn 
respect for the courage and manliness of the men who 
overcame us, and since the close of the war I have 
learned to know many of them as tried and true friends, 
and gentlemen of noblest mold. 



The Men who Made the Army. 31 

were in theory drilled and disciplined and 
made into soldiers, by the little handful of 
. available West-Pointers and the lads from 
the Military Institute at Lexington. In 
point of fact, they were only organized and 
taught the rudiments of the drill before be- 
ing sent to the front as full-fledged soldiers ; 
and it was only after a year or more of act- 
ive serv^ice in the field that they began to 
suspect what the real work and the real 
character of the modern soldier is. 

Our ideas of the life and business of a 
soldier were drawn chiefly from the advent- 
ures of Ivanhoe and Charles O'Malley, two 
worthies with whose personal history al- 
most every man in the army was familiar 
The men who volunteered went to war of 
their own accord, and were wholly unaccus- 
tomed to acting on any other than their 
own motion. They were hardy lovers of 
field sports, accustomed to out-door life, and 
in all physical respects excellent material 
of which to make an army. But they were 



32 A Rebel's Recollections. 

not used to control of any sort, and were 
not disposed to obey anybody except for 
good and sufficient reason given. While 
actually on drill they obeyed the word of 
command, not so much by reason of its 
being proper to obey a command, as be- 
cause obedience was in that case necessary 
to the successful issue of a pretty perform- 
ance in which they were interested. Off 
drill they did as they pleased, holding them- 
selves gentlemen, and as such bound to 
consult only their own wills. Their officers 
were of themselves, chosen by election, and 
subject, by custom, to enforced resignation 
upon petition of the men. Only corporals 
cared sufficiently httle for their position to 
risk any magnifying of their office by the 
enforcement of discipline. I make of them 
an honorable exception, out of regard for 
the sturdy corporal who, at Ashland, 
marched six of us (a guard detail) through 
the very middle of a puddle, assigning as 
his reason for doing so the fact that " It 's 



The Men who Made the Army. 33 

plagued little authority they give us cor- 
porals, and I mean to use that little, any- 
how." Even corporals were elected, how- 
ever, and until December, 1861, I never 
knew a single instance in which a captain 
dared offend his men by breaking a non- 
commissioned officer, or appointing one, 
without submitting the matter to a vote of 
the company. In that first instance the 
captain had to bolster himself up with writ- 
ten authority from head-quarters, and even 
then it required three wrecks of mingled 
diplomacy and discipline to quell the mu- 
tiny which resulted. 

With troops of this kind, the reader will 
readily understand, a feeling of very demo- 
cratic equality prevailed, so far at least as 
miUtary rank had anything to do with it. 
Officers were no better than men, and so 
officers and men messed and slept together 
on terms of entire equality, quarreling and 
even fighting now and then, in a gentle- 
manly way, but without a thought of allow- 
3 



34 A Rebel's Recollections, 

ing differences of military rank to have any 
influence in the matter. The theory was 
that the officers were the creatures of the 
men, chosen by election to represent their 
constituency in the performance of certain 
duties, and that only during good behavior. 
And to this theory the officers themselves 
gave in their adhesion in a hundred ways. 
Indeed, they could do nothing else, inas- 
much as they knew no way of quelling a 
mutiny. 

There was one sort of rank, however, 
which was both maintained and respected 
from the first, namely, that of social life. 
The line of demarkation between gentry 
and common people is not more sharply 
drawn anywhere than in Virginia. It rests 
there upon an indeterminate something or 
other, known as family. To come of a 
good family is a patent of nobility, and 
there is no other way whatever by which 
any man or any woman can find a passage 
into the charmed circle of Virginia's peer- 



The Men who Made the Army, 35 
age. There is no college of heralds, to be 
sure, to which doubtful cases may be re- 
ferred, and there is no law governing the 
matter ; but every Virginian knows what 
famines are, and what are not good ones, 
and so mistakes are impossible. The social 
position of every man is sharply defined, 
and every man carried it with him into the 
army. The man of good family felt him- 
self superior, as in most cases he unques- 
tionably was, to his fellow-soldier of less 
excellent birth; and this distinction was 
sufficient, during the early years of the war, 
to override everything like military rank. 
In one instance which I remember, a young 
private asserted his superiority of social 
standing so effectually as to extort from 
the lieutenant commanding his company a 
public apology for an insult offered in the 
subjection of the private to double duty, as 
a punishment for absence from roll-call. 
The lieutenant was brave enough to have 
taken a flogging at the hands of the in- 



36 A Rebel's Recollections. 

suited private, perhaps, but he could not 
face the declared sentiment of the entire 
company, and so he apologized. I have 
known numberless cases in which privates 
have declined dinner and other invitations 
from officers who had presumed upon their 
shoulder-straps in asking the company of 
their social superiors. 

In the camp of instruction at Ashland, 
where the various cavalry companies exist- 
ing in Virginia were sent to be made into 
soldiers, it was a very common thing in- 
deed for men who grew tired of camp fare 
to take their meals at the hotel, and one or 
two of them rented cottages and brought 
their families there, excusing themselves 
from attendance upon unreasonably early 
roll-calls, by pleading the distance from 
their cottages to the parade-ground. When- 
ever a detail was made for the purpose of 
cleaning the camp-ground, the men detailed 
regarded themselves as responsible for the 
proper performance of the task by their 



The Men who Made the Army. 2)7 
servants, and uncomplainingly took upon 
themselves the duty of sitting on the fence 
and superintending the work. The two or 
three men of the overseer class who were 
to be found in nearly every company turned 
some nimble quarters by standing other 
men's turns of guard-duty at twenty-five 
cents an hour ; and one young gentleman 
of my own company, finding himself as- 
signed to a picket rope post, where his only 
duty was to guard the horses and prevent 
them, in their untrained exuberance of 
spirit, from becoming entangled in each 
other's heels and halters, coolly called his 
servant and turned the matter over to him, 
with a rather informal but decidedly pointed 
injunction not to let those horses get them- 
selves into trouble if he valued his hide. 
This case coming to the ears of Colonel 
(afterwards General) Ewell, who was com- 
manding the camp, that officer reorganized 
the guard service upon principles as novel 
as they were objectionable to the men. 



38 A Rebel's Recollections. 

He required the men to stand their own 
turns, and, worse than that, introduced the 
system, in vogue among regular troops, of 
keeping the entire guard detail at the guard- 
house when not on post, an encroachment 
upon personal liberty which sorely tried the 
patience of the young cavaliers. 

It was in this undisciplined state that the 
men who afterwards made up the army 
under Lee were sent to the field to meet 
the enemy at Bull Run and elsewhere, and 
the only wonder is that they were ever able 
to fight at all. They were certainly not 
soldiers. They were as ignorant of the 
alphabet of obedience as their officers were 
of the art of commanding. And yet they 
acquitted themselves reasonably well, a fact 
which can be explained only by reference 
to the causes of their insubordination in 
camp. These men were the people of the 
South, and the war was their own ; where- 
fore they fought to win it of their own 
accord, and not at all because their officers 



The Men who Made the Army, 39 

commanded them to do so. Their personal 
spirit and their intelHgence were their sole 
elements of strength. Death has few ter- 
rors for such men, as compared with dis- 
honor, and so they needed no officers at all, 
and no discipline, to insure their personal 
good conduct on the field of battle. The 
same elements of character, too, made them 
accept hardship with the utmost cheerful- 
ness, as soon as hardship became a nec- 
essary condition to the successful prosecu- 
tion of a war that every man of them 
regarded as his own. In camp, at Rich- 
mond or Ashland, they had shunned all 
unnecessary privation and all distasteful 
duty, because they then saw no occasion to 
endure avoidable discomfort. But in the 
field they showed themselves great, stalwart 
men in spirit as well as in bodily frame, 
and endured cheerfully the hardships of 
campaigning precisely as they would have 
borne the fatigues of a hunt, as incidents 
encountered in the prosecution of their pur- 
poses. 



40 A RebeVs Recollections. 

During the spring and early summer of 
1 86 1, the men did not dream that they 
were to be paid anything for their services, 
or even that the government was to clothe 
them. They had bought their own uni- 
forms, and whenever these wore out they 
ordered new ones to be sent, by the first 
opportunity, from home. I remember the 
very first time the thought of getting cloth- 
ing from the government ever entered my 
own mind. I was serving in Stuart's cav- 
alry, and the summer of 1861 was nearly 
over. ]\Iy boots had worn out, and as 
there happened at the time to be a strict 
embargo upon all visiting on the part of 
non-military people, I could not get a new 
pair from home. The spurs of my com- 
rades had made uncomfortable impressions 
upon my bare feet every day for a week, 
when some one suggested that I might 
possibly buy a pair of boots from the quar- 
termaster, who w^as for the first time in 
possession of some government property of 



The Men who Made the Amny. 41 

that description. When I returned with 
the boots and reported that the official had 
refused my proffered cash, contenting him- 
self with charging the amount against me 
as a debit to be deducted from the amount 
of my pay and clotJiing allowance, there was 
great merriment in the camp. The idea 
that there w^as anybody back of us in this 
war — anybody who could, by any ingenu- 
ity of legal quibbling, be supposed to be 
indebted to us for our voluntary services in 
our own cause — was too ridiculous to be 
treated seriously. " Pay money " became 
the standing subject for jests. The card- 
playing with which the men amused them- 
selves suffered a revolution at once ; eu- 
chre gave place to poker, played for " pay 
money," the winnings to fall due when pay- 
day should come, — a huge joke which was 
heartily enjoyed. 

From this the reader will see how httle 
was done in the beginning of the war to- 
ward the organization of an efficient quar- 



42 A RebeVs Recollections. 

termaster's department, and how completely 
this ill-organized and undisciplined mob of 
plucky gentlemen was left to prosecute the 
war as best it could, trusting to luck for 
clothing and even for food. Of these 
things I shall have occasion to speak more 
fully in a future chapter, wherein I shall 
have something to say of the management 
of affairs at Richmond. At present, I 
merely refer to the matter for the purpose 
of correcting an error (if I may hope to do 
that) which seems likely to creep into his- 
tory. We have been told over and over 
again that the Confederate army could not 
possibly have given effectual pursuit to 
General McDowell's flying forces after the 
battle of Bull Run. It is urged, in defense 
oi the inaction which made of that day's 
work a waste effort, that we could not move 
forward for want of transportation and sup- 
plies. Now, without discussing the ques- 
tion whether or not a prompt movement on 
Washington would have resulted favorably 



The Men who Made the Army, 43 
to the Confederates, I am certain, as every 
man who was there is, that this want of 
transportation and suppUes had nothing 
whatever to do with it. We had no sup- 
pUes of any importance, it is true, but none 
were coming to us there, and we were no 
whit better off in this regard at Manassas 
than we would have been before Washing- 
ton. And having nothing to transport, we 
needed no transportation. Had the inef- 
ficiency of the supply department stopped 
short at its failure to furnish wagon trains, 
it might have stood in the way of a forward 
movement. But that was no ordinary in- 
competence which governed this depart- 
ment of our service in all its ramifications. 
The breadth and comprehensiveness of that 
incompetence were its distinguishing char- 
acteristics. In failing to furnish anything 
to transport, it neutralized its failure to 
furnish transportation, and the army that 
fought at Bull Run would have been as 
well off anywhere else as there, during the 



44 ^ Rebel's Recollections. 

next ten days. Indeed, two days after the 
battle we were literally starved out at Ma- 
nassas, and were forced to advance to Fair- 
fax Court House in order to get the sup- 
pUes which the Union army had left in 
abundance wherever there was a storing- 
place for them. The next morning after 
the battle, many of the starving men went 
off on their own account to get provisions, 
and they knew very well where to find 
them. There were none at Manassas, but 
by crossing Bull Run and following the line 
of the Federal retreat, we soon gathered a 
store sufficient to last us, while the authori- 
ties of the quartermaster's department were 
finding out how to transport the few sheet- 
iron frying-pans which, with an unnecessary 
tent here and there, were literally the only 
things there were to be transported at all. 
Food, which was the only really necessary 
thing just then, lay ahead of us and no- 
where else. All the ammunition we had 
Vv^e could and did move with the wagons at 
hand. 



The Men who Made the Army. 45 

To return to the temper of the troops 
and people. Did the Southerners really 
think themselves a match for ten times 
their own numbers ? I know the reader 
wants to ask this question, because almost 
everybody I talk to on the subject asks it 
in one shape or another. In answer let me 
say, I think a few of the more enthusiastic 
women, cherishing a blind faith in the 
righteousness of their cause, and believing, 
in spite of historical precedent, that wars 
always end with strict regard to the laws 
of poetic justice, did think something of the 
sort ; and I am certain that all the stump 
speakers of the kind I have hitherto de- 
scribed held a like faith most devoutly. 
But with these exceptions I never saw any 
Southerner who hoped for any but well- 
fought-for success. It was not a question 
of success or defeat with them at all. They 
thought they saw their duty plainly, and 
they did it without regard to the conse- 
quences. Their whole hearts were in the 



46 A RebeVs Recollections. 

cause, and as they were human beings they 
naturally learned to expect the result for 
which they were laboring and fighting and 
suffering ; but they based no hopes upon 
any such fancy as that the Virginian sol- 
dier was the military equivalent of ten or of 
two Pennsylvanians armed as well as he. 
On the contrary, they busily counted the 
chances and weighed the probabilities on 
both sides from the first. They claimed an 
advantage in the fact that their young men 
were more universally accustomed to field 
sports and the use of arms than were those 
of the North. They thought too, that, 
fighting on their own soil, in an essentially 
defensive struggle, they would have some 
advantage, as they certainly did. They 
thought they might in the end tire their 
enemy out, and they hoped from the first 
for relief through foreign intervention in 
some shape. These were the grounds of 
their hopes ; but had there been no hope 
for them at all, I verily believe they would 



The M::7i who Made the Army, 47 

have fought all the same. Certainly they 
had small reason to hope for success after 
the campaign of 1863, but they fought on 
nevertheless, until they could fight no more. 
Let the reader remember that as the South- 
erners understood the case, they could not, 
without a complete sacrifice of honor, do 
anything else than fight on until utterly 
crushed, and he will then be prepared to 
understand how small a figure the question 
of success or failure cut in determining 
their course. 

The unanimity of the people was simply 
marvelous. So long as the question of 
secession was under discussion, opinions 
were both various and violent. The mo- 
ment secession was finally determined upon, 
a revolution was wrought. There was no 
longer anything to discuss, and so discus- 
sion ceased. Men got ready for war, and 
delicate women with equal spirit sent them 
off with smiling faces. The man who tar- 
ried at home for never so brief a time, 



48 A Rebel's Recollections. 

after the call to arms had been given, found 
it necessary to explain himself to every 
woman of his acquaintance, and no explana- 
tion was sufficient to shield him from the 
social ostracism consequent upon any long- 
tarrying. Throughout the war it was the 
same, and when the war ended the men 
who lived to return were greeted with sad 
faces by those who had cheerfully and even 
joyously sent them forth to the battle. 

Under these circumstances, the reader 
will readily understand, the first call for 
troops took nearly all the men of Virginia 
away from their homes. Even the boys in 
the colleges and schools enlisted, and these 
establishments were forced to suspend for 
want of students. In one college the pres- 
ident organized the students, and making 
himself their commander, led them directly 
from the class-room to the field. So strong 
and all-embracing was the thought that 
every man owed it to the community to 
become a soldier, that even clergymen went 



The Me7i who Made the Army, 49 

into the army by the score, and large dis- 
tricts of country were left too without a 
physician, until the people could secure, by 
means of a memorial, the unanimous vote 
of the company to which some favorite 
physician belonged, declaring it to be his 
patriotic duty to remain at home. Without 
such an instruction from his comrades no 
physician would consent to withdraw, and 
even with it very many of them preferred 
to serve in the ranks. 

These were the men of whom the Con- 
federate army was for the first year or two 
chiefly composed. After that the conscrip- 
tion brought in a good deal of material 
which was worse than useless. There were 
some excellent soldiers who came into the 
army as conscripts, but they were excep- 
tions to the rule. For the most part the 
men whose bodies were thus lugged in by 
force had no spirits to bring with them. 
They had already lived a long time under 
all the contumely which a reputation for 
4 



50 A RebeVs Recollections, 

confessed cowardice could bring upon them. 
The verdict of their neighbors was already 
pronounced, and they could not possibly 
change it now by good conduct. They 
brought discontent with them into the 
camp, and were sullenly worthless as sol- 
diers throughout. They were a leaven of 
demoralization which the army would have 
been better without. But they were com- 
paratively few in number, and as the char- 
acter of the army was crystallized long be- 
fore these men came into it at all, they had 
little influence in determining the conduct 
of the whole. If they added nothing to our 
strength, they could do little to weaken us, 
and in any estimate of the character of 
the Confederate army they hardly count at 
all. The men who early in the war strug- 
gled for a place in the front rank, whenever 
there was chance of a fight, and thought 
themselves unlucky if they failed to get it, 
are the men who gave character afterwards 
to the well-organized and well-disciplined 



The Men who Made the Army. 51 

army which so long contested the ground 
before Richmond. They did become sol- 
diers after a while, well regulated and thor- 
oughly effective. The process of disciplin- 
ing them took away none of their personal 
spirit or their personal interest in the war, 
but it taught them the value of unquestion- 
ing obedience, and the virtue there was in 
yielding it. I remember very well the ex- 
treme coolness with which, in one of the 
valley skirmishes, a few days before the 
first battle of Bull Run, a gentleman private 
in my own company rode out of the ranks 
for the purpose of suggesting to J. E. B. 
Stuart the propriety of charging a gun 
which was shelling us, and which seemed 
nearer to us than to its supporting infantry. 
I heard another gentleman without rank, 
who had brought a dispatch to Stonewall 
Jackson, request that officer to " cut the 
answer short," on the ground that his horse 
was a little lame and he feared his inability 
to deliver it as promptly as was desirable. 



52 A Rebel's Recollections, 

These men and their comrades lost none of 
this personal solicitude for the proper con- 
duct of the war, in process of becoming 
soldiers, but they learned not to question or 
advise, when their duty was to listen and 
obey. Their very errors, as General Stu- 
art once said in my hearing, proved them 
the best of material out of which to make 
soldiers. " They are pretty good officers 
now," he said, " and after a while they will 
make excellent soldiers too. They only 
need reducing to the 7'aiiksr 

This personal interest in the war, which 
in their undisciplined beginning led them 
into indiscreet meddling with details of 
policy belonging to their superiors, served 
to sustain them when as disciplined soldiers 
they were called upon to bear a degree of 
hardship of which they had never dreamed. 
They learned to trust the management of 
affairs to the officers, asking no questions, 
but finding their own greatest usefulness 
in cheerful and ready obedience. The wish 



The Men who Made the Army, 53 

to help, which made them unsoldierly at 
first, served to make them especially good 
soldiers when it was duly tempered with 
discipline and directed by experience. The 
result was that even in the darkest days 
of the struggle, when these soldiers knew 
they were losing everything but their honor, 
when desperation led them to think of a 
thousand expedients and to see every blun- 
der that was made, they waited patiently 
for the word of command, and obeyed it 
with alacrity and cheerfulness when it came, 
however absurd it might seem. I remem- 
ber an incident which will serve to illustrate 
this. The Federal forces one day captured 
an important fort on the north side of 
James River, which had been left almost 
unguarded, through the blundering of the 
officer charged with its defense. It must 
be retaken, or the entire line in that place 
must be abandoned, and a new one built, at 
great risk of losing Richmond. Two bodies 
of infantry were ordered to charge it on 



54 ^ Rebel's Recollections. 

different sides, while the command to which 
I was then attached should shell it vigor- 
ously with mortars. In order that the at- 
tack might be simultaneously made on the 
two sides, a specific time was set for it, but 
for some unexplained reason there was a 
misunderstanding between the two com- 
manders. The one on the farther side be- 
gan the attack twenty minutes too soon. 
Every man of the other body, which lay 
there by our still silent mortars, knew per- 
fectly well that the attack had begun, and 
that they ought to strike then if at all. 
They knew that, without their aid and that 
of the mortars, their friends would be re- 
pulsed, and that a like result would follow 
their own assault when it should be made, 
twenty minutes later. They remained as 
they were, however, hearing the rattle of 
the musketry and listening with calm faces 
to the exulting cheers of the victorious 
enemy. Then came their own time, and 
knowing perfectly well that their assault 



The Men who Made the Army. 55 

was now a useless waste of life, they obeyed 
the order as it had been delivered to them, 
and knocked at the very gates of that for- 
tress for an hour. These men, in 1861, 
would have clamored for immediate attack 
as the only hope of accomplishing anything, 
and had their commander insisted, in such 
a case, upon obeying orders, they would in 
all probability have charged without him. 
In 1864, having become soldiers, they 
obeyed orders even at cost of failure. They 
had reduced themselves to the ranks — 
that was all. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE TEMPER OF THE WOMEN. 

During the latter part of the year in 
which the war between the States came to 
an end, a Southern comic writer, in a letter 
addressed to Artemus Ward, summed up 
the political outlook in one sentence, read- 
ing somewhat as follows : " You may recon- 
struct the men, with your laws and things, 
but how are you going to reconstruct the 
women ? Whoop-ee ! " Now this unauthor- 
ized but certainly very expressive interjec- 
tion had a deal of truth at its back, and I 
am very sure that I have never yet known 
a thoroughly " reconstructed " woman. The 
reason, of course, is not far to seek. The 
women of the South could hardly have 
been more desperately in earnest than their 
husbands and brothers and sons were, 



The Temper of the Women. 57 

in the prosecution of the war, but with 
their woman-natures they gave themselves 
wholly to the cause, and having loved it 
heartily when it gave promise of a sturdy 
life, they almost worship it now that they 
have strewn its bier with funeral flowers. 
To doubt its righteousness, or to falter in 
their loyalty to it while it lived, would have 
been treason and infidelity ; to do the like 
now that it is dead would be to them little 
less than sacrilege. 

I wish I could adequately tell my reader 
of the part those women played in the war. 
If I could make these pages show the half 
of their nobleness ; if I could describe the 
sufferings they endured, and tell of their 
cheerfulness under it all ; if the reader 
might guess the utter unselfishness with 
which they laid themselves and the things 
they held nearest their hearts upon the 
altar of the only country they knew as their 
own, the rare heroism with which they 
played their sorrowful part in a drama which 



58 A Rebel's Recollectzo7ts, 

was to them a long tragedy ; if my pages 
could be made to show the half of these 
things, all womankind, I am sure, would 
tenderly cherish the record, and nobody 
would w^onder again at the tenacity with 
which the women of the South still hold 
their allegiance to the lost cause. 

Theirs was a peculiarly hard lot. The 
real sorrows of war, like those of drunken- 
ness, always fall most heavily upon women. 
They may not bear arms. They may not 
•even share the triumphs which compensate 
their brethren for toil and suffering and 
danger. 'They must sit still and endure. 
The poverty which w^ar brings to them 
wears no cheerful face, but sits down with 
them to empty tables and pinches them 
sorely in solitude. 

After the victory, the men who have won 
it throw up their hats in a glad huzza, while 
their wives and daughters await in sorest 
agony of suspense the news which may 
bring hopeless desolation to their hearts. 



The Temper of the Women, 59 

To them the victory may mean the loss of 
those for whom they Uved and in whom 
they hoped, while to those who have fought 
the battle it brings only gladness. And 
all this was true of Southern women almost 
without exception. The fact that all the 
men capable of bearing arms went into the 
army, and stayed there, gave to every 
woman in the South a personal interest not 
only in the general result of each battle, but 
in the list of killed and wounded as well. 
Poverty, too, and privation of the sorest 
kind, was the common lot, while the absence 
of the men laid many heavy burdens of work 
and responsibility upon shoulders unused to 
either. But they bore it all, not cheerfully 
only, but gladly. They believed it to be 
the duty of every able-bodied man to serve 
in the army, and they eagerly sent the men 
of their own homes to the field, frowning 
undisguisedly upon every laggard until 
there were no laggards left. And their 
spirit knew no change as the war went on. 



6o A Rebel's Recollections. 

Their idea of men's duty comprehended 
nothing less than persistence as long as a 
shot could be fired. When they saw that 
the end was not to be victory, but defeat, 
that fact made no change whatever in their 
view of the duty to be done. Still less did 
their own privations and labors and suffer- 
ings tend to dampen their ardor. On the 
contrary, the more heavily the war bore 
upon themselves, the more persistently did 
they demand that it should be fought out 
to the end. When they lost a husband, a 
son, or a brother, they held the loss only an 
additional reason for faithful adherence to 
the cause. Having made such a sacrifice 
to that which was almost a religion to them, 
they had, if possible, less thought than ever 
of proving unfaithful to it. 

I put these general statements first, so 
that the reader who shall be interested in 
such anecdotes as I shall have to tell may 
not be misled thereby into the thought that 
these good women were implacable or vin- 



The Temper of the Women. 6i 

dictive, when they were only devoted to a 
cause which in their eyes represented the 
sum of all righteousness, 

I remember a conversation between two 
of them, — one a young wife whose hus- 
band was in the army, and the other an 
elderly lady, with no husband or son, but 
with many friends and near relatives in 
marching regiments. The younger lady 
remarked, — 

" I 'm sure I do not hate our enemies. I 
earnestly hope their souls may go to heaven, 
but I would like to blow all their mortal 
bodies away, as fast as they come upon our 
soil." 

" Why, you shock me, my dear," replied 
the other ; " I don't see why you want the 
Yankees to go to heaven ! I hope to get 
there myself some day, and I 'm sure I 
should n't want to go if I thought I should 
find any of them there." 

This old lady was convinced from the 
first that the South would fail, and she 



62 A Rebel's Recollections. 

based this belief upon the fact that we 
had permitted Yankees to build railroads 
through the Southern States. " I tell you," 
she would say, " that 's what they built the 
railroads for. They knew the war was 
coming, and they got ready for it. The 
railroads will whip us, you may depend. 
What else were they made for } We got 
on well enough without them, and we 
ought n't to have let anybody build them." 
And no amount of reasoning would serve 
to shake her conviction that the people of 
the North had built all our railroads with 
treacherous intent, though the stock of the 
only road she had ever seen was held very 
largely by the people along its line, many 
of whom were her own friends. 

She always insisted, too, that the North- 
ern troops came South and made war for 
the sole purpose of taking possession of our 
lands and negroes, and she was astonished 
almost out of her wits when she learned 
that the negroes were free. She had sup- 



The Temper of the Women. ^2) 

posed that they were simply to change 
masters, and even then she Uved for months 
in daily anticipation of the coming of " the 
new land owners," who were waiting, she 
supposed, for assignments of plantations to 
be made to them by military authority. 

" They '11 quarrel about the division, may- 
be," she said one day, " and then there '11 
be a chance for us to whip them again, I 
hope." The last time I saw her, she had 
not yet become convinced that title-deeds 
were still to be respected. 

A young girl, ordinarily of a very gentle 
disposition, astonished a Federal colonel 
one day by an outburst of temper which 
served at least to show the earnestness of 
her purpose to uphold her side of the argu- 
ment. She lived in a part of the country 
then for the first time held by the Federal 
army, and a colonel, with some members of 
his staff, made her family the unwilling 
recipients of a call one morning. Seeing 
the piano open, the colonel asked the young 



64 A Rebel's Recollections. 

lady to play, but she declined. He then 
went to the instrument himself, but he 
had hardly begun to play when the damsel, 
raising the piano top, severed nearly all the 
strings with a hatchet, saying to the aston- 
ished performer, as she did so, — 

" That 's my piano, and it shall not give 
you a minute's pleasure." The colonel 
bowed, apologized, and replied, — 

" If all your people are as ready as you 
to make costly sacrifices, we might as well 
go home." 

And most of them were ready and will- 
ing to make similar sacrifices. One lady 
of my acquaintance knocked in the heads 
of a dozen casks of choice wine rather than 
allow some Federal officers to sip as many 
glasses of it. Another destroyed her own 
library, which was very precious to her, 
when that seemed the only way in which 
she could prevent the staff of a general 
officer, camped near her, from enjoying a 
few hours' reading in her parlor every morn- 
ing. 



The Te7nper of the Women, 65 
In New Orleans, soon after the war, I 
saw in a drawing-room, one day, an elabo- 
rately framed letter, of which, the curtains 
being dra\fn, I could read only the signa- 
ture, which to my astonishment was that 
of General Butler. 

"What is that?" I asked of the young 
gentlewoman I was visiting. 

"Oh, that's my diploma, my certificate 
of good behavior, from General Butler ; " 
and taking it down from the wall, she per- 
mitted me to read it, telling me at the 
same time its history. It seems that the 
young lady had been very active in aiding 
captured Confederates to escape from New 
Orleans, and for this and other similar of- 
fenses she was arrested several times. A 
gentleman who knew General Butler per- 
sonally had interested himself in behalf of 
her and some of her friends, and upon 
making an appeal for their discharge re- 
ceived this personal note from the com- 
manding general, in which he declared his' 
5 



.66 A Rebel's Recollections, 

willingness to discharge all the others, 
"But that black-eyed Miss B.," he wrote, 
" seems to me an incorrigible little devil 
whom even prison fare won't tame." The 
young lady had framed the note, and she 
cherishes it yet, doubtless. 

There is a story told of General Forrest, 
which will serve to show his opinion of the 
pluck and devotion of the Southern women. 
He was drawing his men up in line of 
battle one day, and it was evident that a 
sharp encounter was about to take place. 
Some ladies ran from a house, which hap- 
pened to stand just in front of his line, and 
asked him anxiously, — 

"What shall we do, general, what shall 
we do .? " • / 

Strong in his faith that they only wished 
to help in some way, he replied, — 

" I really don't see that you can do much, 
except to stand on stumps, wave your bon- 
nets, and shout ' Hurrah, boys ! ' " ' 

In Richmond, when the hospitals were 



The Temper of the Women. 67 

filled with wounded men brought in from 
the seven days' fighting with McClellan, 
and the surgeons found it impossible to 
dress half the wounds, a band was formed, 
consisting of nearly all the married women 
of the city, who took upon themselves the 
duty of going to the hospitals and dressing 
wounds from morning till night ; and they 
persisted in their painful duty until every 
man was cared for, saving hundreds of lives, 
as the surgeons unanimously testified. 
When nitre was found to be growing scarce, 
and the supply of gunpowder was conse- 
quently about to give out, women all over 
the land dug up the earth in their smoke- 
houses and tobacco barns, and with their 
own hands faithfully extracted the desired 
salt, for use in the government laboratories. 
Many of them denied themselves not 
only delicacies, but substantial food also, 
when by enduring semi-starvation they 
could add to the stock of food at the com- 
mand of the subsistence of^cers. I myself 



6S A RebeVs Recollections, 

knew more than one houseful of women, 
who, from the moment that food began to 
grow scarce, refused to eat meat or drink 
coffee, Hving thenceforth only upon vege- 
tables of a speedily perishable sort, in order 
that they might leave the more for the sol- 
diers in the field. When a friend remon- 
strated with one of them, on the ground 
that her health, already frail, was breaking 
down utterly for want of proper diet, she 
replied, in a quiet, determined way, " I 
know that very well ; but it is little that I 
can do, and I must do that little at any 
cost. My health and my life are worth less 
than those of my brothers, and if they give 
theirs to the cause, why should not I do the 
same } I would starve to death cheerfully 
if I could feed one soldier more by doing so, 
but the things I eat can't be sent to camp. 
I think it a sin to eat anything that can be 
used for rations." And she meant what 
she said, too, as a little mound in the 
church-yard testifies. 



The Temper of the Wo7nen, 69 

Every Confederate remembers gratefully 
the reception given him when he went into 
any house where these women were. Who- 
ever he might be, and whatever his plight, 
if he wore the gray, he was received, not as 
a beggar or tramp, not even as a stranger, 
but as a son of the house, for whom it held 
nothing too good, and whose comfort was 
the one care of all its inmates, even though 
their own must be sacrificed in securing it. 
When the hospitals were crowded, the peo- 
ple earnestly besought permission to take 
the men to their houses and to care for 
them there, and for many months almost 
every house within a hundred miles of 
Richmond held one or more wounded men 
as especially honored guests. 

" God bless these Virginia women ! " said 
a general officer from one of the cotton 
States, one day, " they're worth a regiment 
apiece ; " and he spoke the thought of the 
army, except that their blessing covered the 
whole country as well as Virginia. 



70 A Rebel's Recollections, 

The ingenuity with which these good 
ladies discovered or manufactured onerous 
duties for themselves was surprising, and 
having discovered or imagined some new 
duty they straightway proceeded to do it at 
any cost. An excellent Richmond dame 
was talking with a soldier friend, when he 
carelessly remarked that there was nothing 
which so greatly helped to keep up a con- 
tented and cheerful 'spirit among the men 
as the receipt of letters from their woman 
friends. Catching at the suggestion as a 
revelation of duty, she asked, " And cheer- 
fulness makes better soldiers of the men, 
does it not "^ " Receiving yes for an an- 
swer, the frail little woman, already over- 
burdened with cares of an unusual sort, sat 
down and made out a list of all the men 
with whom she was acquainted even in the 
smallest possible way, and from that day 
until the end of the war she wrote one let- 
ter a week to each, a task which, as her ac- 
quaintance was large, taxed her time and 



The Temper of the Women, 71 

strength very severely. Not content with 
this, she wrote on the subject in the news- 
papers, earnestly urging a like course upon 
her sisters, many of whom adopted the sug- 
gestion at once, much to the delight of the 
soldiers, who little dreamed that the kindly, 
cheerful, friendly letters which every mail 
brought into camp, were a part of woman's 
self-appointed work for the success of the 
common cause. From the beginning to 
the end of the war it was the same. No 
cry of pain escaped woman's lips at the 
parting which sent the men into camp ; no 
word of despondency was spoken when 
hope seemed most surely dead ; no com- 
plaint from the women ever reminded their 
soldier husbands and sons and brothers 
that there was hardship and privation and ' 
terror at home. They bore all with brave 
hearts and cheerful faces, and even when 
they mourned the death of their most ten- 
derly loved ones, they comforted them- 
selves with the thought that they buried 
only heroic dust. 



72 A Rebel's Recollections, ■ 

" It is the death I would have chosen/€or 
him," wrote the widow of a friend whose 
loss I had announced to her. " I loved him 
for his manliness, and now that he has 
shown that manliness by dying as a hero 
dies, I mourn, but am not heart-broken. I 
know that a brave man awaits me whither 
I am going." 

They carried their efforts to cheer and 
help the troops into every act of their 
lives. When they could, they visited camp. 
Along the lines of march they came out 
with water or coffee or tea, — the best they 
had, whatever it might be, — with flowers, 
or garlands of green when their flowers 
were gone. A bevy of girls stood under a 
sharp fire from the enemy's lines at Peters- 
burg one day, while they sang Bayard Tay- 
lor's Song of the Camp, responding to an 
encore with the stanza : — 

" Ah! soldiers, to your honored rest, 
Your truth and valor bearing, 
The bravest are the tenderest, 
The loving are the daring ! " 



The Temper of the Women, "j^ 

Indeed, the coolness of women under fire 
was always a matter of surprise to me. A 
young girl, not more than sixteen years of 
age, acted as guide to a scouting party dur- 
ing the early years of the war, and when 
we urged her to go back after the enemy 
had opened a vigorous fire upon us, she 
declined, on the plea that she believed we 
were " going to charge those fellows," and 
she "wanted to see the fun." At Peters- 
burg women did their shopping and went 
about their duties under a most uncom- 
fortable bombardment, without evincing the 
slightest fear or showing any nervousness 
whatever. 

But if the cheerfulness of the women dur- 
ing the war was remarkable, what shall we 
say of the way in which they met its final 
failure and the poverty that came with it } 
The end of the war completed the ruin 
which its progress had wrought. Women 
who had always lived in luxury, and whose 
labors and sufferings during the war were 



74 A RebeVs Recollections. 

lightened by the consciousness that in suf- 
fering and laboring they were doing their 
part toward the accomplishment of the end 
upon which all hearts were set, were now 
compelled to face not temporary but per- 
manent poverty, and to endure, without a 
motive or a sustaining purpose, still sorer 
privations than any they had known in the 
past. The country was exhausted, and no- 
body could foresee any future but one of 
abject wretchedness. It was seed-time, but 
the suddenly freed negroes had not yet 
learned that freedom meant aught else than 
idleness, and the spring was gone before 
anything like a reorganization of the labor 
system could be effected. The men might 
emigrate when they should get home, but 
the case of the women was a very sorry 
one indeed. They kept their spirits up 
through it all, however, and improvised a 
new social system in which absolute pov- 
erty, cheerfully borne, was the badge of re- 



The Temper of the Women, 75 

spectability. Everybody was poor except 
the speculators who had fattened upon the 
necessities of the women and children, and 
so poverty was essential to anything like 
good repute. The return of the soldiers 
made some sort of social festivity neces- 
sary, and " starvation parties " were given, 
at which it was understood that the givers 
were wholly unable to set out refreshments 
of any kind. In the matter of dress, too, 
the general poverty was recognized, and 
every one went clad in whatever he or she 
happened to have. The want of means 
became a jest, and nobody mourned over 
it ; while all were laboring to repair their 
wasted fortunes as they best could. And 
all this was due solely to the unconquer- 
able cheerfulness of the Southern women. 
The men came home moody, worn out, 
discouraged, and but for the influence of 
woman's cheerfulness, the Southern States 
might have fallen into a lethargy from 



76 A Rebel's Recollections. 

which they could not have recovered for 
generations. 

Such prosperity as they have since 
achieved is largely due to the courage and 
spirit of their noble women. 



CHAPTER IV. 

OF THE TIME WHEN MONEY WAS "EASY." 

It seems a remarkable fact that during 
the late Congressional travail with the cur- 
rency question, no one of the people in or 
out of Congress, who were concerned lest 
there should not be enough money in the 
country to "move the crops," ever took 
upon himself the pleasing task of rehears- 
ing the late Confederacy's financial story, 
for the purpose of showing by example how 
simple and easy a thing it is to create 
wealth out of nothing by magic revolutions 
of the printing-press, and to make rich, by 
act of Congress, everybody not too lazy to 
gather free dollars into a pile. The story 
has all the flavor of the Princess Schehere- 
zade's romances, with the additional merit 
of being historically true. For once a whole 



78 A Rebel's Recolleciions. 

people was rich. Money was " easy " enough 
to satisfy everybody, and everybody had it 
in unstinted measure. This money was not, 
it is true, of a quality to please the believers 
in a gold or other arbitrary standard of 
value, but that is a matter of little conse- 
quence, now that senators and representa- 
tives of high repute have shown that the 
best currency possible is that which exists 
only by the will of the government, and the 
volume of which is regulated by the crav- 
ings of the people alone. That so apt an 
illustration of the financial views of the ma- 
jority in Congress should have been wholly 
neglected, during the discussions, seems 
therefore unaccountable. • 

The financial system adopted by the Con- 
federate government was singularly simple 
and free from technicalities. It consisted 
chiefly in the issue of treasury notes enough 
to meet all the expenses of the government, 
and in the present advanced state of the art 
of printing there was but one difficulty in- 



When Money was " Easy'' 79 

cident to this process ; namely, the impos- 
sibihty of having the notes signed in the 
Treasury Department, as fast as they were 
needed. There happened, however, to be 
several thousand young ladies in Richmond 
willing to accept light and remunerative 
employment at their homes, and as it was 
really a matter of small moment whose 
name the notes bore, they were given out 
in sheets to these young ladies, who signed 
and returned them for a consideration. I 
shall not undertake to guess how many 
Confederate treasury notes were issued. 
Indeed, I am credibly informed by a gen- 
tleman who was high in office in the Treas- 
ury Department, that even the secretary 
himself did not certainly know. The acts 
of Congress authorizing issues of currency 
were the hastily formulated thought of a 
not very wise body of men, and my inform- 
ant tells me they were frequently suscepti- 
ble of widely different construction by dif- 
ferent officials. However that may be, it 



8o A Rebel's Recollections, 

was clearly out of the power of the govern- 
ment ever to redeem the notes, and what- 
ever may have been the state of affairs 
within the treasury, nobody outside its pre- 
cincts ever cared to muddle his head in an 
attempt to get at exact figures. 

We knew only that money was astonish- 
ingly abundant. Provisions fell short some- 
times, and the supply of clothing was not 
always as large as we should have liked, 
but nobody found it difficult to get money 
enough. It was to be had almost for the 
asking. And to some extent the abun- 
dance of the currency really seemed to 
atone for its extreme badness. Going the 
rounds of the pickets on the coast of South 
Carolina, one day, in 1863, I heard a con- 
versation between a Confederate and a 
Union soldier, stationed on opposite sides 
of a little inlet, in the course of which this 
point was brought out. 

Union Soldier. Are n't times rather hard 
over there, Johnny .^ 



When Money was '' EasyT 8i 

Co7ifederate Soldier. Not at all. We 've 
all the necessaries of life. 

U. S. Yes ; but how about luxuries 1 
You never see any coffee nowadays, do 



you } 




C. S. 


Plenty of it. 


U. S. 


Is n't it pretty high } 


c s. 


Forty dollars a pound, that 's all. 


u. s. 


Whew ! Don't you call that 


high ■> 





C. S. (after reflecting). Well, perhaps 
it is a trifle uppish, but then you never saw 
money so plentiful as it is with us. We 
hardly know what to do with it, and don't 
mind paying high prices for things we 
want. 

And that was the universal feeling. 
Money was so easily got, and its value was 
so utterly uncertain, that we were never 
able to determine what was a fair price for 
anything. We fell into the habit of paying 
whatever was asked, knowing that to-mor- 
row we should have to pay more. Specu- 



82 A Rebel's Recollections. 

lation became the easiest and surest thing 
imaginable. The speculator saw no risks 
of loss. Every article of merchandise rose, 
in value every day, and to buy anything 
this week and sell it next was to make an 
enormous profit quite as a matter of course. 
So uncertain were prices, or rather so con- 
stantly did they tend upward, that when a 
cargo of cadet gray cloths was brought into 
Charleston once, an officer in my battery, 
attending the sale, was able to secure 
enough of the cloth to make two suits of 
clothes, without any expense whatever, 
merely by speculating upon an immediate 
advance. He became the purchaser, at 
auction, of a case of the goods, and had no 
difficulty, as soon as the sale was over, in 
finding a merchant who was glad to take 
his bargain off his hands, giving him the 
cloth he wanted as a premium. The of- 
ficer could not possibly have paid for the 
case of goods, but there was nothing surer 
than that he could sell again at an advance 



When Money was ''Easy'' Z^ 

the. moment the auctioneer's hammer fell 
on the last lot of cloths. 

Naturally enough, speculation soon fell 
into very bad repute, and the epithet 
" speculator " came to be considered the 
most opprobrious in the whole vocabulary 
of invective. The feeling was universal 
that the speculators were fattening upon 
the necessities of the country and the suf- 
ferings of the people. Nearly all mercan- 
tile business was regarded at least with 
suspicion, and much of it fell into the hands 
of people with no reputations to lose, a fact 
which certainly did not tend to relieve the 
community in the matter of high prices. 

The prices which obtained were almost 
fabulous, and singularly enough there 
seemed to be no sort of ratio existing be- 
tween the values of different articles. I 
bought coffee at forty dollars and tea at 
thirty dollars a pound on the same day. 

My dinner at a hotel cost me twenty 
dollars, while five dollars gained me a seat 



84 A Rebel's Recollections. 

in the dress circle of the theatre. I paid 
one dollar the next morning for a copy of 
the Examiner, but I might have got the 
Whig, Dispatch, Enquirer, or Sentinel, for 
half that sum. For some wretched tallow 
candles I paid ten dollars a pound. The 
utter absence of proportion between these 
several prices is apparent, -and I know of no 
way of explaining it except upon the theory 
that the unstable character of the money 
had superinduced a reckless disregard of all 
value on the part of both buyers and sellers. 
A facetious friend used to say prices were 
so high that nobody could see them, and 
that they "got mixed for want of super- 
vision." He held, however, that the differ- 
ence between the old and the new order 
of things was a trifling one. " Before the 
war," he said, " I went to market with the 
money in my pocket, and brought back my 
purchases in a basket; now I take the 
money in the basket, and bring the things 
home in my pocket." 



When Money was " EasyT 85 

As I was returning to my home after the 
surrender at Appomattox Court House, a 
party of us stopped at the residence of a 
planter for supper, and as the country was 
full of marauders and horse thieves, desert- 
ers from both armies, bent upon indiscrimi- 
nate plunder, our host set a little black boy 
to watch our horses while we ate, with in- 
structions to give the alarm if anybody 
should approach. After supper we dealt 
liberally with little Sam. Silver and gold 
we had none, of course, but Confederate 
money was ours in great abundance, and 
we bestowed the crisp notes upon the 
guardian of our horses, to the extent of 
several hundreds of dollars. A richer per- 
son than that little negro I have never seen. 
Money, even at par, never carried more of 
happiness with it than did those promises 
of a dead government to pay. We frankly 
told Sam that he could buy nothing with 
the notes, but the information brought no 
sadness to his simple heart. 



86 A RebeVs Recollections. 

" I don' want to buy nothin', master," he 
replied. " I 's gwine to keep dis "Aways!' 

I fancy his regard for the worthless pa- 
per, merely because it was called money, 
was closely akin to the feeling which had 
made it circulate among better-informed 
people than he. Everybody knew, long be- 
fore the surrender, that these notes never 
could be redeemed. There was little rea- 
son to hope, during the last two years of 
the war, that the " ratification of a treaty 
of peace between the Confederate States 
and the United States," on which the pay- 
ment was conditioned, would ever come. 
We knew the paper was worthless, and yet 
it continued to circulate. It professed to 
be money, and on the strength of that pro- 
fession people continued to take it in pay- 
ment for goods. The amount of it for 
which the owner of any article would part 
with his possession was always uncertain. 
Prices were regulated largely by accident, 
and were therefore wholly incongruous. 



When Money was '''' EasyT 87 

But the disproportion between the prices 
of different articles was not greater than 
that between the cost of goods imported 
through the blockade and their selling 
price. The usual custom of blockade-run- 
ning firms was to build or buy a steamer in 
Europe, bring it to Nassau in ballast, and 
load it there with assorted merchandise. 
Selling this cargo in Charleston or Wil- 
mington for Confederate money, they would 
buy cotton with which to reload the ship 
for her outward voyage. The owner of 
many of these ships once told me that if a 
vessel which had brought in one cargo were 
lost with a load of cotton on her outward 
voyage, the owner would lose nothing, the 
profits on the merchandise being fully equal 
to the entire value of ship and cotton. If 
he could get one cargo of merchandise in, 
and one of cotton out, the loss of the ship 
with a second cargo of merchandise would 
still leave him a clear profit of more than a 
hundred per cent, upon his investment. 



88 A RebcTs Recollections, 

And this was due solely to the abnormal 
state of prices in the country, and not at all 
to the management of the blockade-run- 
ners. They sold their cargoes at auction, 
and bought cotton in the open market. 

Their merchandise brought fabulous 
prices, while cotton, for want of a market, 
remained disproportionately low. That the 
merchants engaged in this trade were in no 
way the authors of the state of prices may 
be seen from two facts. First, if I am cor- 
rectly informed, they uniformly gave the 
government an opportunity to take such 
articles as it had need of, and especially all 
the quinine imported, at the price fixed in 
Richmond, without regard to the fact that 
speculators would pay greatly more for the 
goods. In one case within my own knowl- 
edge a heavy invoice of quinine was sold to 
the government for eleven hundred dollars 
an ounce, when a speculator stood ready to 
take it at double that price. Secondly, the 
cargo sales were peremptory, and specu- 



JV/ien Money was " EasyT 89 

lators sometimes combined and bought a 
cargo considerably below the market price, 
by appearing at the sale in such numbers 
as to exclude all other bidders. In one 
case, I remember, the general commanding 
at Charleston annulled a cargo sale on this 
account, and sent some of the speculators 
to jail for the purpose of giving other peo- 
ple an opportunity to purchase needed 
goods at prices very much higher than 
those forced upon the sellers by the combi- 
nation at the first sale. 

In the winter of 1863-64 Congress be- 
came aware of the fact that prices were 
higher than they should be under a sound 
currency. If Congress suspected this at 
any earher date, there is nothing in the pro- 
ceedings of that body to indicate it. Now, 
however, the newspapers were calling at- 
tention to an uncommonly ugly phase of 
the matter, and reminding Congress that 
what the government bought with a cur- 
rency depreciated to less than one per cent. 



QO A RebeVs Recollectio7is, 

of its face, the government must some day 
pay for in gold at par. The lawgivers took 
the alarm and sat themselves down to de- 
vise a remedy for the evil condition of af- 
fairs. With that infantile simplicity which 
characterized nearly all the doings and 
quite all the financial legislation of the 
Richmond Congress, it was decided that 
the very best way to enhance the value of 
the currency was to depreciate it still fur- 
ther by a declaratory statute, and then to 
issue a good deal more of it. The act set a 
•day, after which the currency already in cir- 
culation should be worth only two thirds of 
its face, at which rate it was made convert- 
ible into notes of the new issue, which 
•some, at least, of the members of Congress 
were innocent enough to believe would be 
worth very nearly their par value. This 
measure was intended, of course, to compel 
the funding of the currency, and it had 
that effect to some extent, without doubt. 
Much of the old currency remained in cir- 



When Money was ''Easy.''' 91 

dilation, however, even after the new notes 
were issued. For a time people calculated 
the discount, in passing and receiving the 
old paper, but as the new notes showed an 
undiminished tendency to still further de- 
preciation, there were people, not a few, 
who spared themselves the trouble of mak- 
ing the distinction. 

I am sometimes asked at what time 
prices attained their highest point in the 
Confederacy, and I find that memory fails 
to answer the question satisfactorily. They 
were about as high as they could be in the 
fall of 1863, and I should be disposed to 
fix upon that as the time when the climax 
was reached, but for my consciousness that 
the law of constant appreciation was a fixed 
one throughout the war. The financial 
condition got steadily worse to the end. 
I believe the highest price, relatively, I 
ever saw paid, was for a pair of boots. A 
cavalry ofiicer, entering a little country 
store, found there one pair of boots which 



92 A Rebel's Recollections, 

fitted him. He inquired the price. " Two 
hundred dollars," said the merchant. A 
five hundred dollar bill was offered, but the 
merchant, having no smaller bills, could 
not change it. " Never mind," said the 
cavalier, " I '11 take the boots anyhow. 
Keep the change ; I never let a little mat- 
ter of three hundred dollars stand in the 
way of a trade." 

That was on the day before Lee's surren- 
der, but it would not have been an impossi- 
ble occurrence at any time during the pre- 
ceding year. The money was of so little 
value that we parted with it gladly whenever 
it would purchase anything at all desirable. 
I cheerfully paid five dollars for a little salt, 
at Petersburg, in August, 1864, and being 
thirsty drank my last two dollars in a half- 
pint of cider. 

The government's course in levying a tax 
in kind, as the only possible way of making 
the taxation amount to anything, led speed- 
ily to the adoption of a similar plan, as far 



When Mo7iey was '' Easy.'' 93 
as possible, by the people. A physician 
would order from his planter friend ten or 
twenty visits' worth of corn, and the trans- 
action was a perfectly intelligible one to 
both. The visits would be counted at ante- 
war rates, and the corn estimated by the 
same standard. In the early spring of 
1865 I wanted a horse, and a friend having 
one to spare, I sent for the animal, offering 
to pay whatever the owner should ask for 
it. He could not fix a price, having liter- 
ally no standard of value to which he could 
appeal, but he sent me the horse, writing, 
in reply to my note, — 

" Take the horse, and when the war shall 
be over, if we are both alive and you are 
able, give me as good a one in return. 
Don't send any note or due-bill. It might 
complicate matters if either should die." 

A few months later, I paid my debt by 
returning the very horse I had bought. I 
give this incident merely to show how 
utterly without financial compass or rudder 
we were. 



94 A Rebel's RecoUectio7is. 

How did people manage to live during 
such a time ? I am often asked ; and as 
I look back at the history of those years, 
I can hardly persuade myself that the prob- 
lem was solved at all. A large part of the 
people, however, was in the army, and drew 
rations from the government. During the 
early years of the war, officers were not 
given rations, but were allowed to buy pro- 
visions from the commissaries at govern- 
ment prices. Subsequently, however, when 
provisions became so scarce that it was 
necessary to limit the amount consumed by 
officers as well as that eaten by the men, 
the purchase system was abolished, and 
the whole army was fed upon daily rations. 
The country people raised upon their plan- 
tations all the necessaries of life, and were 
generally allowed to keep enough of them 
to live on, the remainder being taken by 
the subsistence officers for army use. The 
problem of a salt supply, on which depend- 
ed the production of meat, was solved in 



When Money was " EasyT 95 

part by the' establishment of small salt fac- 
tories along the coast, and in part by Gov- 
ernor Letcher's vigorous management of 
the works in southwestern Virginia, and his 
wise distribution of the product along the 
various lines of railroad. 

In the cities, living was not by any means 
so easy as in the country. Business was 
paralyzed, and abundant as money was, it 
seems almost incredible that city people 
got enough of it to live on. Very many of 
them were employed, however, in various 
capacities, in the arsenals, departments, 
bureaus, etc., and these were allowed to 
buy rations at fixed rates, after the post- 
office clerks in Richmond had brought mat- 
ters to a crisis by resigning their clerkships 
to go into the army, because they could not 
support life on their salaries of nine thou- 
sand dollars a year. For the rest, if people 
had anything to sell, they got enormous 
prices for it, and could live a while on the 
proceeds. Above all, a kindly, helpful spirit 



96 A RebeVs Recollections. 

was developed by the common suffering, 
and this, without doubt, kept many thou- 
sands of people from starvation. Those 
who had anything shared it freely with 
those who had nothing. There was no 
selfish looking forward, and no hoarding for 
the time to come. During those terrible 
last years, the future had nothing of pleas- 
antness in its face, and people learned not 
to think of it at all. To get through to- 
day was the only care. Nobody formed 
any plans or laid by any money for to-mor- 
row or next week or next year, and indeed 
to most of us there really seemed to be no 
future. I remember the start it gave me 
when a clergyman, visiting camp, asked a 
number of us whether our long stay in 
defensive works did not afford us an ex- 
cellent opportunity to study with a view to 
our professional life after the war. We 
were not used to think of ourselves as 
possible survivors of a struggle which was 
every day perceptibly thinning our ranks. 



When Money zuas " EasyT 97 

The coming of ultimate failure we saw 
clearly enough, but the future beyond was 
a blank. The subject was naturally not a 
pleasant one, and by common consent it 
was always avoided in conversation, until 
at last we learned to avoid it in thought as 
well. We waited gloomily for the end, but 
did not care particularly to speculate upon 
the question when and how the end was to 
come. There was a vague longing for rest, 
which found vent now and then in wild 
newspaper stories of signs and omens por- 
tending the close of the war, but beyond 
this the matter was hardly ever discussed. 
We had early forbidden ourselves to think 
of any end to the struggle except a success- 
ful one, and that being now an impossi- 
bility, we avoided the subject altogether. 
The newspaper stories to which reference 
is made above were of the wildest and ab- 
surdest sort. One Richmond paper issued 
an extra, in which it was gravely stated 
that there was a spring near Fredericksburg 
7 



98 A Rebel's Recolleetions, 

which had ceased to flow thirty days before 
the surrender of the British at Yorktown, 
thirty days before the termination of the 
w^ar of 1812, and thirty days before the 
Mexican war ended ; and that " this sin- 
gularly prophetic fountain has now again 
ceased to pour forth its waters." At an- 
other time a hen near Lynchburg laid an 
^^g, the newspapers said, on which were 
traced, in occult letters, the words, "peace 
in ninety days." 

Will the reader believe that with gold at 
a hundred and twenty-five for one, or twelve 
thousand four hundred per cent, premium ; 
when every day made the hopelessness of 
the struggle more apparent ; when our last 
man was in the field ; when the resources 
of the country were visibly at an end, there 
were financial theorists who honestly be- 
lieved that by a mere trick of legislation 
the currency could be brought back to par .? 
I heard some of these people explain their 
plan during a two days' stay in Richmond. 



When Money was " EasyP 99 

Gold, they said, is an inconvenient currency 
always, and nobody wants it, except as a 
basis. The government has some gold, — 
several millions in fact, — and if Congress 
will only be bold enough to declare the 
treasury notes redeemable at par in coin, 
we shall have no further difficulty with our 
finances. So long as notes are redeemable 
in gold at the option of the holder, nobody 
wants them redeemed. Let the govern- 
ment say to the people, We will redeem the 
currency whenever you wish, and nobody 
except a few timid and unpatriotic people 
will care to change their convenient for an 
inconvenient money. The gold which the 
government holds will suffice to satisfy 
these timid ones, and there will be an end 
of high prices and depreciated currency. 
The government can then issue as much 
more currency as circumstances may make 
necessary, and strong in our confidence in 
ourselves we shall be the richest people on 
earth ; we shall have created the untold 
wealth which our currency represents. 



lOO A Rebel's Recollectio7ts, 

I am not jesting. This is, as nearly as I 
can repeat it, the utterance of a member of 
the Confederate Congress made in my 
presence in a private parlor. If the reader 
thinks the man was insane, I beg him to 
look over the reports of the debates on 
financial matters which have been held in 
Washington. 

The effects of the extreme depreciation 
of the currency were sometimes almost 
ludicrous. One of my friends, a Richmond 
lady, narrowly escaped very serious trouble 
in an effort to practice a wise economy. 
Anything for which the dealers did not ask 
an outrageously high price seemed wonder- 
fully cheap always, and she, at least, lacked 
the self-control necessary to abstain from 
buying largely whenever she found any- 
thing the price of which was lower than 
she had supposed it would be. Going into 
market one morning with " stimulated ideas 
of prices," as she phrased it, the conse- 
quence of having paid a thousand dollars 



When Money was ^^ EasyT loi 

for a barrel of flour, she was surprised to 
find nearly everything selling for consid- 
erably less than she had expected. Think- 
ing that for some unexplained cause there 
was a temporary depression in prices, she 
purchased pretty largely in a good many 
directions, buying, indeed, several things 
for which she had almost no use at all, and 
buying considerably more than she needed 
of other articles. As she was quitting the 
market on foot, — for it had becpme dis- 
reputable in Richmond to ride in a carriage, 
and the ladies would not do it on any ac- 
count, — she was tapped on the shoulder 
by an officer who told her she was under 
arrest, for buying in market to sell again. 
As the lady was well known to prominent 
people she was speedily released, but she 
thereafter curbed her propensity to buy 
freely of cheap things. Buying to sell 
again had been forbidden under severe pen- 
alties, — an absolutely necessary measure 
for the protection of the people against the 



I02 A Rebel's Recolkctions. 

rapacity of the hucksters, who, going early 
into the markets, would buy literally every- 
thing there, and by agreement among them- 
selves double or quadruple the already ex- 
orbitant rates. It became necessary also 
to suppress the gambling-houses in the in- 
terest of the half-starved people. At such 
a time, of course, gambling was a very com- 
mon vice, and the gamblers made Rich- 
mond their head-quarters. It was the cus- 
tom of the proprietors of these establish- 
ments to set costly suppers in their parlors 
every night, for the purpose of attracting 
visitors likely to become victims. For 
these suppers they must have the best of 
everything without stint, and their lavish 
rivalry in the poorly stocked markets had 
the effect of advancing prices to a danger- 
ous point. To suppress the gambling- 
houses was the sole remedy, and it was 
only by uncommonly severe measures that 
the suppression could be accomplished. It 
was therefore enacted that any one found 



WImi AIo7iey was " Easy'' 103 

guilty of keeping a gambling-house should 
be publicly whipped upon the bare back, 
and as the infliction of the penalty in one 
or two instances effectually and perma- 
nently broke up the business of gambling, 
even in the disorganized and demoralized 
state in which society then was, it may be 
said with confidence that whipping is the 
one certain remedy for this evil. Whether 
it be not, in ordinary cases, worse than the 
evil which it cures, it is not our business 
just now to inquire. 

The one thing which we were left almost 
wholly without, during the war, was litera- 
ture. Nobody thought of importing books 
through the blockade, to any adequate ex- 
tent, and the facilities for publishing them, 
even if we had had authors to write them, 
were very poor indeed. A Mobile firm re- 
printed a few of the more popular books of 
the time, Les Miserables, Great Expecta- 
tions, etc., and I have a pamphlet edition of 
Owen Meredith's Tannhauser, bound in 



I04 A Rebel's Recollections. 

coarse wall-paper, for which I paid seven 
dollars, in Charleston. Singularly enough, 
I bought at the same time a set of Dickens's 
works, of English make, well printed and 
bound in black cloth, for four dollars a 
volume, a discrepancy which I am wholly 
unable to explain. In looking through a 
file of the Richmond Examiner extending 
over most of the year 1864, I find but one 
book of any sort advertised, and the price 
of that, a duodecimo volume of only ']2 
pages, was five dollars, the publishers prom- 
ising to send it by mail, post-paid, on re- 
ceipt of the price. 

Towards the last, as I have already said, 
resort was had frequently to first principles, 
and bartering, or " payment in kind," as it 
was called, became common, especially in 
those cases in which it was necessary to 
announce prices in advance. To fix a price 
for the future in Confederate money when 
it was daily becoming more and more exag- 
geratedly worthless, would have been sheer 



When Money was '' Easy^ 105 
folly ; and so educational institutions, coun- 
try boarding-houses, etc., advertised for 
patronage at certain prices, payment to be 
made in provisions at the rates prevailing 
in September, 1860. In the advertisement 
of Hampden Sidney College, in the Ex- 
aminer for October 4, 1864, I find it stated 
that students may get board in private 
families at about eight dollars a month, pay- 
able in this way. The strong contrast be- 
tween the prices of i860 and those of 1864 
is shown by a statement, in the same ad- 
vertisement, that the students who may 
get board at eight dollars a month in pro^ 
visions, can buy wood at twenty-five dollars 
a cord and get their washing done for seven 
dollars and fifty cents a dozen pieces. 

This matter of prices was frequently 
made a subject for jesting in private, but 
for the most part it was carefully avoided 
in the newspapers. It was too ominous of 
evil to be a fit topic of editorial discussion 
on ordinary occasions. As with the ac- 



io6 A Rebel's Recollections. 

counts of battles in which our arms were 
not successful, necessary references to the 
condition of the finances were crowded into 
a corner, as far out of sight as possible. 
The Examiner, being a sort of newspaper 
Ishmael, did now and then bring the sub- 
ject up, however, and on one occasion it 
denounced with some fierceness the charges 
prevailing in the schools ; and I quote a 
passage from Prof. Sidney H. Owens's re- 
ply, which is interesting as a summary of 
the condition of things in the South at that 
time : — 

" The charges made for tuition are about 
five or six times as high as in 1 860. Now, 
sir, your shoemaker, carpenter, butcher, 
market man, etc., demand from twenty, to 
thirty, to forty times as much as in i860. 
Will you show me a civilian who is charg- 
ing only six times the prices charged in 
i860, except the teacher only.? As to the 
amassing of fortunes by teachers, spoken 
of in your article, make your calculations. 



When Money was '' EasyT 107 
sir, and you will find that to be almost an 
absurdity, since they pay from twenty to 
forty prices for everything used, and are 
denounced exorbitant and unreasonable in 
demanding five or six prices for their own 
labor and skill." 

There were compensations, however. 
When gold was at twelve thousand per 
cent, premium with us, we had the consola- 
tion of knowing that it was in the neigh- 
borhood of one hundred above par in New 
York, and a Richmond paper of September 
22, 1864, now before me, fairly chuckles 
over the high prices prevailing at the North, 
in a two-line paragraph which says, " Tar 
is selling in New York at two dollars a 
pound. It used to cost eighty cents a bar- 
rel." That paragraph doubtless made many 
a five-dollar beefsteak palatable. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CHEVALIER OF THE LOST CAUSE. 

The queer people who devote their en- 
ergies to the collection of autographs have 
a habit, as everybody whose name has been 
three times in print must have discovered, 
of sohciting from their victim "an auto- 
graph ivith a sentiment," and the unfortu- 
nate one is expected, in such cases, to say 
something worthy of himself, something 
especially which shall be eminently charac- 
teristic, revealing, in a single sentence, the 
whole man, or woman, as the case may be. 
How large a proportion of the efforts to do 
this are measurably successful, nobody but 
a collector of the sort referred to can say ; 
but it seems probable that the most char- 
acteristic autograph " sentiments " are those 
which are written of the writer's own mo- 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause, 109 

tion and not of malice aforethought. I re- 
member seeing a curious collection of these 
once, many of which were certainly not 
unworthy the men who wrote them. One 
read, " I. O. U. fifty pounds lost at play, — 
Charles James Fox ; " and another was a 
memorandum of sundry wagers laid, signed 
by the Right Honorable Richard Brinsley 
Sheridan. These, I thought, bore the im- 
press of their authors' character, and it is 
at the least doubtful whether either of the 
distinguished gentlemen would have done 
half so well in answer to a modest request 
for a sentiment and a signature. 

In the great dining-hall of the Briars, an 
old-time mansion in the Shenandoah Val- 
ley, the residence of Mr. John Esten Cooke, 
there hangs a portrait of a broad-shouldered 
cavalier, and beneath is written, in the 
hand of the cavalier himself, 
" Yoiu's to count on, 

J. E. B. Stuart," 
an autograph sentiment which seems to me 



1 1 o A RebeVs Recollections. 

a very perfect one in its way. There was 
no point in Stuart's character more strongly 
marked than the one here hinted at. He 
was " yours to count on " always : your 
friend if possible, your enemy if you would 
have it so, but your friend or your enemy 
" to count on," in any case. A franker, 
more transparent nature, it is impossible to 
conceive. What he was he professed to 
be. That which he thought, he said, and 
his habit of thinking as much good as he 
could of those about him served to make 
his frankness of speech a great friend- 
winner. 

I saw him for the first time when he was 
a colonel, in command of the little squadron 
of horsemen known as the first regiment of 
Virginia cavalry. The company to which I 
belonged was assigned to this regiment 
immediately after the evacuation of Har- 
per's Ferry by the Confederates. General 
Johnston's army was at Winchester, and 
the Federal force under General Patterson 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause, 1 1 1 

lay around Martinsburg. Stuart, with his 
three or four hundred men, was encamped 
at Bunker Hill, about midway between the 
two, and thirteen miles from support of any 
kind. He had chosen this position as a 
convenient one from which to observe the 
movements of the enemy, and the tireless 
activity which marked his subsequent ca- 
reer so strongly had already begun. As 
he afterwards explained, it was his purpose 
to train and school his men, quite as much 
as anything else, that prompted the greater 
part of his madcap expeditions at this time, 
and if there be virtue in practice as a means 
of perfection, he was certainly an excellent 
school-master. 

My company arrived at the camp about 
noon, after a march of three or four days, 
having traveled twenty miles that morn- 
ing. Stuart, whom we encountered as we 
entered the camp, assigned us our position, 
and ordered our tents pitched. Our cap- 
tain, who was even worse disciphned than 



112 A Rebel's Recollections, 

we were, seeing a much more comfortable 
camping-place than the muddy one assigned 
to us, and being a comfort-loving gentle- 
man, proceeded to lay out a model camp 
at a distance of fifty yards from the spot 
indicated. It was not long before the 
colonel particularly wished to consult with 
that captain, and after the consultation the 
volunteer officer was firmly convinced that 
all West Point graduates were martinets, 
with no knowledge whatever of the courte- 
sies due from one gentleman to another. 

We were weary after our long journey, 
and disposed to welcome the prospect of 
rest which our arrival in the camp held 
out. But resting, as we soon learned, had 
small place in our colonel's tactics. We 
had been in camp perhaps an hour, when 
an order came directing that the company 
be divided into three parts, each under 
command of a lieutenant, and that these re- 
port immediately for duty. Reporting, we 
were directed to scout through the country 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause. 1 1 3 

around Martinsburg, going as near the 
town as possible, and to give battle to any 
cavalry force we might, meet. Here was 
a pretty lookout, certainly! Our officers 
knew not one inch of the country, and 
might fall into all sorts of traps and ambus- 
cades ; and what if we should meet a caval- 
ry force greatly superior to our own ? This 
West Point colonel was rapidly forfeiting 
our good opinion. Our lieutenants were 
brave fellows, however, and they led us 
boldly if ignorantly, almost up to the very 
gates of the town occupied by the enemy. 
We saw some cavalry but met none, their 
orders not being so peremptorily belligerent, 
perhaps, as ours were ; wherefore they gave 
us no chance to fight them. The next 
morning our unreasonable colonel again 
ordered us to mount, in spite of the fact 
that there were companies in the camp 
which had done nothing at all the day be- 
fore. This time he led us himself, taking 
pains to get us as nearly as possible sur- 
8 



114 ^ Rebel's Recollections. 

rounded by infantry, and then laughingly 
telling us that our chance for getting out 
of the difficulty, except by cutting our way 
through, was an exceedingly small one. I 
think we began about this time to suspect 
that we were learning something, and that 
this reckless colonel was trying to teach us. 
But that he was a hare-brained fellow, lack- 
ing the caution belonging to a commander, 
we were unanimously agreed. He led us 
out of the place at a rapid gait, before the 
one gap in the enemy's lines could be 
closed, and then jauntily led us into one or 
two other traps, before taking us back to 
camp. 

But it was not until General Patterson 
began his feint against Winchester that our 
colonel had full opportunity to give us his 
field lectures. When the advance began, 
and our pickets were driven in, the most 
natural thing to do, in our view of the situ- 
ation, was to fall back upon our infantry 
supports at Winchester, and I remember 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause. 1 1 5 

hearing various expressions of doubt as to 
the coloneFs sanity when, instead of falUng 
back, he marched his handful of men right 
up to the advancing hues, and ordered us 
to dismount. The Federal skirmish line 
was coming toward us at a double-quick, 
and we were set going toward it at a like 
rate of speed, leaving our horses hundreds 
of yards to the rear. We could see that 
the skirmishers alone outnumbered us three 
or four times, and it really seemed that our 
colonel meant to sacrifice his command 
deliberately. He waited until the infantry 
was within about two hundred yards of us, 
we being in the edge of a little grove, and 
they on the other side of an open field. 
Then Stuart cried out, " Backwards — 
march ! steady, men, — keep your faces to 
the enemy ! " and we marched in that way 
through the timber, delivering our shot-gun 
fire slowly as we fell back toward our 
horses. Then mounting, with the skir- 
mishers almost upon us, we retreated, not 



1 1 6 A Rebel's Recollections. 

hurriedly, but at a slow trot, which the 
colonel would on no account permit us to 
change into a gallop. Taking us out into 
the main road he halted us in column, with 
our backs to the enemy. 

" Attention ! " he cried. " Now I want 
to talk to you, men. You are brave fel- 
lows, and patriotic ones too, but you are 
ignorant of this kind of work, and I am 
teaching you. I want you to observe that 
a good man on a good horse can never be 
caught. Another thing : cavalry can tjvt 
away from anything, and a gallop is a gait 
unbecoming a soldier, unless he is going 
toward the enemy. Remember that. We 
gallop toward the enemy, and trot away, al- 
ways. Steady now ! don't break ranks ! " 

And as the words left his lips a shell 
from a battery half a mile to the rear hissed 
over our heads. 

" There," he resumed. " I 've been wait- 
ing for that, and watching those fellows. I 
knew they 'd shoot too high, and I wanted 
you to learn how shells sound." 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause. 1 1 7 

We spent the next day or two literally 
within the Federal lines. We were shelled, 
skirmished with, charged, and surrounded 
scores of times, until we learned to hold in 
high regard our colonel's masterly skill in 
getting into and out of perilous positions. 
He seemed to blunder into them in sheer 
recklessness, but in getting out he showed 
us the quality of his genius ; and before we 
reached Manassas, we had learned, among 
other things, to entertain a feeling closely 
akin to worship for our brilliant and daring 
leader. We had begun to understand, too, 
how much force he meant to give to his 
favorite dictum that the cavalry is the eye 
of the army. 

His restless activity was one, at least, of 
the qualities which enabled him to win the 
reputation he achieved so rapidly. He 
could never be still. He was rarely ever 
in camp at all, and he never showed a sign 
of fatigue. He led almost everything. 
Even after he became a general officer, 



1 1 8 A Rebel's Recollections, 

with well-nigh an army of horsemen under 
his command, I frequently followed him as 
my leader in a little party of half a dozen 
troopers, who might as well have gone with 
a sergeant on the duty assigned them ; and 
once I was his only follower on a scouting 
expedition, of which he, a brigadier-general 
at the time, was the commander. I had 
been detailed to do some clerical work at 
his head-quarters, and, having finished the 
task assigned me, was waiting in the piazza 
of the house he occupied, for somebody to 
give me further orders, when Stuart came 
out. 

" Is that your horse } " he asked, going 
up to the animal and examining him mi- 
nutely. 

I replied that he was, and upon being 
questioned further informed him that I did 
not wish to sell my steed. Turning to me 
suddenly, he said, — 

" Let 's slip off on a scout, then ; I '11 
ride your horse and you can ride mine. I 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause, 1 1 9 
want to try your beast's paces ; " and 
mounting, we galloped away. Where or 
how far he intended to go I did not know. 
He was enamored of my horse, and rode, 
I suppose, for the pleasure of riding an an- 
imal which pleased him. We passed out- 
side our picket line, and then, keeping in 
the woods, rode within that of the Union 
army. Wandering about in a purposeless 
way, we got a near view of some of the 
Federal camps, and finally finding ourselves 
objects of attention on the part of some 
well-mounted cavalry in blue uniforms, we 
rode rapidly down a road toward our own 
Hues, our pursuers riding quite as rapidly 
immediately behind us. 

" General," I cried presently, " there is a 
Federal picket post on the road just ahead 
of us. Had we not better oblique into the 
woods } " 

" Oh no. They won't expect us from 
this direction, and we can ride over them 
before they make up their minds who we 



are. 



I20 A RebeVs Recollections. 

Three minutes later we rode at full speed 
through the corporal's guard on picket, and 
were a hundred yards or more away before 
they could level a gun at us. Then half a 
dozen bullets whistled about our ears, but 
the cavalier paid no attention to them. 

" Did you ever time this horse for a half- 
mile } " was all he had to say. 

Expeditions of this singular sort were by 
no means uncommon occurrences with him. 
I am told by a friend who served on his 
staff, that he would frequently take one of 
his aids and ride away otherwise unattended 
into the enemy's lines ; and oddly enough 
this was one of his ways of making friends 
with any officer to whom his rough, boyish 
ways had given offense. He would take 
the officer with him, and when they were 
alone would throw his arms around his 
companion, and say, — 

" My dear fellow, you must n't be angry 
with me, — you know I love you." 

His boyishness was always apparent, and 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause, 121 

the affectionate nature of the man was 
hardly less so, even in public. He was 
especially fond of children, and I remember 
seeing him in the crowded waiting-room of 
the railroad station at Gordonsville with a 
babe on each arm ; a great, bearded war- 
rior, with his plumed hat, and with golden 
spurs clanking at his heels, engaged in a 
mad frolic with all the little people in the 
room, charging them right and left with the 
pair of babies which he had captured from 
their unknown mothers. 

It was on the day of my ride with him 
that I heard him express his views of the 
war and his singular aspiration for him- 
self. It was almost immediately after Gen- 
eral McClellan assumed command of the 
army of the Potomac, and while we were 
rather eagerly expecting him to attack our 
strongly fortified position at Centreville. 
Stuart was talking with some members of 
his staff, with whom he had been wrestling 
a minute before. He said somethino: about 



122 A Rebel's Recollections. 

what they could do by way of amusement 
when they should go into winter-quarters. 

"That is to say," he continued, *' if 
George B. McClellan ever allows us to go 
into winter-quarters at all." 

" Why, general ? Do you think he will 
advance before spring ? " asked one of the 
officers. 

" Not against Centreville," replied the 
general. " He has too much sense for that, 
and I think he knows the shortest road to 
Richmond, too. If I am not greatly mis- 
taken, we shall hear of him presently on his 
way up the James River." 

In this prediction, as the reader knows, he 
was right. The conversation then passed 
to the question of results. 

" I regard it as a foregone conclusion," 
said Stuart, " that we shall ultimately whip 
the Yankees. We are bound to believe 
that, anyhow ; but the war is going to be a 
long and terrible one, first. We Ve only 
just begun it, and very few of us will see 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause. 123 

the end. All I ask of fate is that I may be 
killed leading a cavalry charge!' 

The remark was not a boastful or seem- 
ingly insincere one. It was made quietly, 
cheerfully, almost eagerly, and it impressed 
me at the time with the feeling that the 
man's idea of happiness was what the 
French call glory, and that in his eyes 
there was no glory like that of dying in one 
of the tremendous onsets which he knew so 
well how to make. His wish was granted, 
as we know. He received his death-wound 
at the head of his troopers. 

With those about him he was as affec- 
tionate as a woman, and his little boyish 
ways are remembered lovingly by those of 
his military household whom I have met 
since the war came to an end. On one oc- 
casion, just after a battle, he handed his 
coat to a member of his staff, saying, — 

" Try that on, captain, and see how it fits 
you." 

The garment fitted reasonably well, and 
the general continued, — 



124 A Rebel's Recollections. 

" Pull off two of the stars, and wear the 
coat to the war department, and tell the 
people there to make you a major." 

The officer did as his chief bade him. 
Removing two of the three stars he made 
the coat a major's uniform, and the captain 
was promptly promoted in compliance with 
Stuart's request. 

General Stuart was, without doubt, capa- 
ble of handling an infantry command suc- 
cessfully, as he demonstrated at Chancel- 
lorsville, where he took Stonewall Jackson's 
place and led an army corps in a very se- 
vere engagement ; but his special fitness 
was for cavalry service. His tastes were 
those of a horseman. Perpetual activity 
was a necessity of his existence, and he en- 
joyed nothing so much as danger. Audac- 
ity, his greatest virtue as a cavalry com- 
mander, would have been his besetting sin 
in any other position. Inasmuch as it is 
the business of the cavalry to live as con- 
stantly as possible within gunshot of the 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause. 125 

enemy, his recklessness stood him in ex- 
cellent stead as a general of horse, but it is 
at least questionable whether his want of 
caution would not have led to disaster if 
his command had been of . a less mobile 
sort. His critics say he was vain, and he 
was so, as a boy is. He liked to win the 
applause of his friends, and he liked still 
better to astonish the enemy, glorying in 
the thought that his foemen must admire 
his " impudence," as he called it, while they 
dreaded its manifestation. He was contin- 
ually doing things of an extravagantly au- 
dacious sort, Vv^ith no other purpose, seem- 
ingly, than that of making people stretch 
their eyes in wonder. He enjoyed the ad- 
miration of the enemy far more, I think, 
than he did that of his friends. This fact 
was evident in the care he took to make 
himself a conspicuous personage in ever}^ 
time of danger. He would ride at some 
distance from his men in a skirmish, and 
in every possible way attract a dangerous 



126 A RebeVs Recollections. 

attention to himself. His slouch hat and 
long plume marked him in every battle, and 
made him a target for the riflemen to shoot 
at. In all this there was some vanity, if we 
choose to call it so, but it was an excellent 
sort of vanity for a cavalry chief to culti- 
vate. I cannot learn that he ever boasted 
of any achievement, or that his vanity was 
ever satisfied with the things already done. 
His audacity was due, I think, to his sense 
of humor, not less than to his love of ap- 
plause. He would laugh uproariously over 
the astonishment he imagined the Federal 
officers must feel after one of his peculiarly 
daring or sublimely impudent performances. 
When, after capturing a large number of 
horses and mules on one of his raids, he 
seized a telegraph station and sent a dis- 
patch to General Meigs, then Quartermas- 
ter-General of the United States army, 
complaining that he could not afford to 
come after animals of so poor a quality, and 
urging that officer to provide better ones 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause. 127 

for capture in future, he enjoyed the joke 
quite as heartily as he did the success 
which made it possible. 

The boyishness to which I have referred 
ran through every part of his character and 
every act of his life. His impetuosity in 
action, his love of military glory and of the 
military life, his occasional waywardness 
with his friends and his generous affection 
for them, — all these were the traits of a 
great boy, full, to running over, of impul- 
sive animal life. His audacity, too, which 
impressed strangers as the most marked 
feature of his character, was closely akin to 
that disposition which Dickens assures us 
is common to all boy-kind, to feel an insane 
delight in anything which specially imperils 
their necks. But the peculiarity showed 
itself most strongly in his love of uproari- 
ous fun. Almost at the beginning of the 
war he managed to surround himself with 
a number of persons whose principal qual- 
ification for membership of his military 



128 A RebeVs Recollections. 

household was their abihty to make fun. 
One of these was a noted banjo-player and 
ex-negro minstrel: He played the banjo 
and sang comic songs to perfection, and 
therefore Stuart wanted him. I have known 
him to ride with his banjo, playing and 
singing, even on a march which might be 
changed at any moment into a battle ; and 
Stuart's laughter on such occasions was 
sure to be heard as an accompaniment as 
far as the minstrel's voice could reach. He 
had another queer character about him, 
whose chief recommendation was his gro- 
tesque fierceness of appearance. This was 
Corporal Hagan, a very giant in frame, 
with an abnormal tendency to develop hair. 
His face was heavily bearded almost to his 
eyes, and his voice was as hoarse as distant 
thunder, which indeed it closely resembled. 
Stuart, seeing him in the ranks, fell in love 
with his peculiarities of person at once, and 
had him detailed for duty at head-quarters, 
where he made him a corporal, and gave 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause. 129 

him charge of the stables. Hagan, whose 
greatness was bodily only, was much elated 
by the attention shown him, and his person 
seemed to swell and his voice to grow 
deeper than ever under the influence of the 
newly acquired dignity of chevrons. All 
this was amusing, of course, and Stuart's 
delight was unbounded. The man remained 
with him till the time of his death, though 
not always as a corporal. In a mad freak 
of fun one day, the chief recommended his 
corporal for promotion, to see, he said, if 
the giant was capable of further swelling, 
and so the corporal became a lieutenant 
upon the staff. 

With all his other boyish traits, Stuart 
had an almost child-like simplicity of char- 
acter, and the combination of sturdy man- 
hood with juvenile frankness and w^omanly 
tenderness of feeling made him a study to 
those who knew him best. His religious 
feeling was of that unquestioning, serene 
sort which rarely exists apart from the inex- 
9 



130 A Rebel's Recollections. 

perience and the purity of women or chil- 
dren. 

While I was serving in South Carolina, I 
met one evening the general commanding 
the military district, and he, upon learning 
that I had served with Stuart, spent the en- 
tire evening talking of his friend, for they 
two had been together in the old army 
before the war. He told me many anec- 
dotes of the cavalier, nearly all of which 
turned in some way upon the generous 
boyishness of his character in some one or 
other of its phases. He said, among other 
things, that at one time, in winter-quarters 
on the plains of the West I think, he, Stu- 
art, and another officer (one of those still 
living who commanded the army of the 
Potomac during the war) slept together in 
one bed, for several months. Stuart and 
his brother lieutenant, the general said, had 
a quarrel every night about some trifling 
thing or other, just as boys will, but when 
he had made all the petulant speeches he 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause. 131 

could, Stuart would lie still a while, and 
then, passing his arm around the neck of 
his comrade, would draw his head to his 
own breast and say some affectionate thing 
which healed all soreness of feeling and 
effectually restored the peace. During the 
evening's conversation this general formu- 
lated his opinion of Stuart's mihtary char- 
acter in very striking phrase. 

" He is," he said, " the greatest cavalry 
officer that ever lived. He has all the dash, 
daring, and audacity of Murat, and a great 
deal more sense." It was his opinion, how- 
ever, that there were men in both armies 
who would come to be known as greater 
cavalry men than Stuart, for the reason 
that Stuart used his men strictly as cavalry, 
while others would make dragoons of them. 
He believed that the nature of our country 
was much better adapted to dragoon than 
to cavalry service, and hence, while he 
thought Stuart the best of cavalry officers, 
he doubted his abiUty to stand against such 



132 A Rebel's Recollections, 

men as General Sheridan, whose conception 
of the proper place of the horse in our war 
was a more correct one, he thought, than 
Stuart's. " To the popular mind," he went 
on to say, " every soldier who rides a horse 
is a cavalry man, and so Stuart will be meas- 
ured by an incorrect standard. He will be 
classed with General Sheridan and meas- 
ured by his success or the want of it. Gen- 
eral Sheridan is without doubt the greatest 
of dragoon commanders, as Stuart is the 
greatest of cavalry men ; but in this coun- 
try dragoons are worth a good deal more 
than cavalry, and so General Sheridan will 
probably win the greater reputation. He 
will deserve it, too, because behind it is the 
sound judgment which tells him what use 
to make of his horsemen." 

It is worthy of remark that all this was 
said before General Sheridan had made his 
reputation as an officer, and I remember 
that at the time his name was almost new 
to me. 



Chevalier of the Lost Caicse. 133 

From my personal experience and obser- 
vation of General Stuart, as well as from 
the testimony of others, I am disposed to 
think that he attributed to every other man 
qualities and tastes like his own. Insensi- 
ble to fatigue himself, he seemed never to 
understand how a well man could want 
rest ; and as for hardship, there was noth- 
ing, in his view, which a man ought to en- 
joy quite so heartily, except danger. For a 
period of ten days, beginning before and 
ending after the first battle of Bull Run, we 
were not allowed once to take our saddles 
off. Night and day we were in the imme- 
diate presence of the enemy, catching naps 
when there happened for the moment to be 
nothing else to do, standing by our horses 
while they ate from our hands, so that we 
might slip their bridles on again in an in- 
stant in the event of a surprise, and eating 
such things as chance threw in our way, 
there being no rations anywhere within 
reach. After the battle, we were kept 



134 ^ Rebel's Recollections. 

scouting almost continually for two days. 
We then marched to Fairfax Court House, 
and my company was again sent out in de- 
tachments on scouting expeditions in the 
neitrhborhood of Vienna and Falls Church. 
We returned to camp at sunset and were 
immediately ordered on picket. In the 
regular course of events we should have 
been relieved the next morning, but no 
relief came, and we were wholly without 
food. Another twenty-four hours passed, 
and still nobody came to take our place on 
the picket line. Stuart passed some of our 
men, however, and one of them asked him 
if he knew we had been on duty ten days, 
and on picket thirty-six hours without food. 
" Oh nonsense I " he replied. " You don't 
look starved. There 's a cornfield over 
there ; jump the fence and get a good 
breakfast. You don't want to go back to 
camp, I know ; it 's stupid there, and all 
the fun is out here. I never go to camp 
if I can help it. Besides, I 've kept your 



Chevalier of the Lost Catise. 135 

company on duty all this time as a compli- 
ment. You boys have acquitted yourselves 
too well to be neglected now, and I mean 
to give you a chance." 

We thought this a jest at the time, but 
we learned afterwards that Stuart's idea of 
a supreme compliment to a company was 
its assignment to extra hazardous or extra 
fatiguing duty. If he observed specially 
good conduct on the part of a company, 
squad, or individual, he was sure to reward 
it by an immediate order to accompany him 
upon some unnecessarily perilous expedi- 
tion. 

His men believed in him heartily, and it 
was a common saying among them that 
"Jeb never says 'Go, boys,' but always 
' Come, boys.' " We felt sure, too, that 
there was little prospect of excitement on 
any expedition of which he was not leader. 
If the scouting was to be merely a matter 
of form, promising nothing in the way of 
adventure, he would let us go by ourselves ; 



136 A Rebel's Recollections, 

but if there were prospect of " a fight or a 
race," as he expressed it, we were sure to 
see his long plume at the head of the col- 
umn before we had passed outside our own 
line of pickets. While we lay in advance 
of Fairfax Court House, after Bull Run, 
Stuart spent more than a month around the 
extreme outposts on Mason's and Munson's 
hills without once coming to the camp of 
his command. When he wanted a greater 
force than he could safely detail from the 
companies on picket for the day, he would 
send after it, and with details of this kind 
he lived nearly all the time between the 
picket lines of the two armies. The out- 
posts were very far in advance of the place 
at which we should have met and fought 
the enemy if an advance had been made, 
and so there was literally no use whatever 
in his perpetual scouting, which was kept 
up merely because the man could not rest. 
But aside from the fact that the cavalry 
was made up almost exclusively of the 



Chevalier of the Lost Cause. 137 

young men whose tastes and habits spe- 
cially fitted them to enjoy this sort of serv- 
ice, Stuart's was one of those magnetic 
natures which always impress their own 
likeness upon others, and so it came to be 
thought a piece of good luck to be detailed 
for duty under his personal leadership. 
The men liked him and his ways, one of 
which was the pleasant habit he had of 
remembering our names and faces. I heard 
him say once that he knew by name not 
only every man in his old regiment, but 
every one also in the first brigade, and as I 
never knew him to hesitate for a name, I 
am disposed to believe that he did not 
exaggerate his ability to remember men. 
This and other like things served to make 
the men love him personally, and there can 
be no doubt that his skill in winning the 
affection of his troopers was one of the ele- 
ments of his success. Certainly no other 
man could have got so much hard service 
out of men of their sort, without breeding 
discontent amono: them. 



CHAPTER VI. 

LEE, JACKSON, AND SOME LESSER WORTHIES. 

The story goes that when Napoleon 
thanked a private one day for some small 
service, giving him the complimentary title 
of " captain," the soldier replied with 
the question, " In what regiment, sire ? " 
confident that this kind of recognition 
from the Little Corporal meant nothing 
less than a promotion, in any case ; and 
while commanders are not ordinarily in- 
vested with Napoleon's plenary powers in 
such matters, military men are accustomed 
to value few things more than the favora- 
ble comments of their superiors upon their 
achievements or their capacity. And yet 
a compliment of the very highest sort, 
which General Scott paid Robert E. Lee, 
very nearly prevented the great Confederate 



Lee^ Jackson^ and Others. 139 

from achieving a reputation at all. Up to 
the time of Virginia's secession, Lee was 
serving at Scott's head-quarters, and when 
he resigned and accepted a commission 
from the governor of his native State, Gen- 
eral Scott, who had already called him " the 
flower of the American army," pronounced 
him the best organizer in the country, and 
congratulated himself upon the fact that 
the Federal organization was already well 
under way before Lee began that of the 
Southern forces. This opinion, coming 
from the man who was recognized as best 
able to form a judgment on such a sub- 
ject, greatly strengthened Lee's hand in 
the work he was then doing, and saved 
him the annoyance of dictation from peo- 
ple less skilled than he. But it nearly 
worked his ruin, for all that. The adminis- 
tration at Richmond was of too narrow a 
mold to understand that a man could be 
a master of more than one thing, and so, 
recognizing Lee's supreme ability as an 



140 A RebeVs Recollections, 

organizer, the government seems to have 
assumed that he was good for very Httle 
else, and until the summer of 1862 he was 
carefully kept out of the way of all great 
military operations. When the two cen- 
tres of strategic interest were at Winches- 
ter and Manassas, General Lee was kept 
in Western Virginia with a handful of raw 
troops, where he could not possibly accom- 
plish anything for the cause, or even exer- 
cise the small share of fighting and stra- 
tegic ability which the government was 
willing to believe he possessed. When 
there was no longer any excuse for keep- 
ing him there, he was disinterred, as it 
were, and reburied in the swamps of the 
South Carolina coast. 

I saw him for the first time, in Rich- 
mond, at the very beginning of the war, 
dining with him at the house of a friend. 
He was then in the midst of his first popu- 
larity. He had begun the work of organiza- 
tion, and was ever3^where recognized as the 



Lee, Jackson, and Others, 141 

leader who was to create an army for us 
out of the volunteer material. I do not 
remember, with any degree of certainty, 
whether or not we expected him also to 
distinguish himself in the field, but as Mr. 
Davis and his personal followers were still 
in Montgomery, it is probable that the 
narrowness of their estimate of the chief- 
tain was not yet shared by anybody in 
Richmond. Lee was at this time a young- 
looking, middle-aged man, with dark hair, 
dark moustache, and an otherwise smooth 
face, and a portrait taken then would hard- 
ly be recognized at all by those who knew 
him only after the cares and toils of war 
had furrowed his face and bleached his hair 
and beard. He was a model of manly 
beauty ; large, well made, and graceful. 
His head was a noble one, and his coun- 
tenance told, at a glance, of his high char- 
acter and of that perfect balance of faculties, 
mental, moral, and physical, which consti- 
tuted the chief element of his greatness. 



142 A Rebel's Recollections. 

There was nothing about him which im- 
pressed one more than his eminent rohiist- 
ness, a quahty no less marked in his in- 
tellect and his character than in his phys- 
ical constitution. If his shapely person 
suggested a remarkable capacity for endur- 
ance, his manner, his countenance, and his 
voice quite as strongly hinted at the great 
soul which prompted him to take upon him- 
self the responsibility for the Gettysburg 
campaign, when the people were loudest 
in their denunciations of the government 
as the author of that ill-timed undertaking. 
I saw him next in South Carolina dur- 
ing the winter of 1861-62. He was living 
quietly at a little place called Coosaw- 
hatchie, on the Charleston and Savannah 
Railroad. He had hardly any staff with 
him, and was surrounded with none of the 
pomp and circumstance of war. His dress 
bore no marks of his rank, and hardly in- 
dicated even that he was a military man. 
He was much given to solitary afternoon 



Lee, Jacks 071, and Others. 143 

rambles, and came almost every day to the 
camp of our battery, where he wandered 
alone and in total silence around the stables 
and through the gun park, much as a 
farmer curious as to cannon might have 
done. Hardly any of the men knew who 
he was, and one evening a sergeant, riding 
in company with a partially deaf teamster, 
met him in the road and saluted. The 
teamster called out to his companion, in a 
loud voice, after the manner of deaf people : 

" I say, sergeant, who is that durned old 
fool ? He 's always a-pokin' round my 
bosses just as if he meant to steal one of 
*em." 

Certainly the honest fellow was not to 
blame for his failure to recognize, in the 
farmer - looking pedestrian, the chieftain 
who was shortly to win the greenest lau- 
rels the South had to give. During the 
following summer General Johnston's " bad 
habit of getting himself wounded " served 
to bring Lee to the front, and from that 



144 A Rebel's Recollections, 

time till the end of the war he was the 
idol of army and people. The faith he in- 
spired was simply marvelous. We knew 
very well that he was only a man, and very 
few of us would have disputed the abstract 
proposition that he was liable to err ; but 
practically we believed nothing of the kind. 
Our confidence in his skill and his invin- 
cibihty was absolutely unbounded. Our 
faith in his wisdom and his patriotism was 
equally perfect, and from the day on which 
he escorted McClellan to his gun-boats till 
the hour of his surrender at Appomattox, 
there was never a time when he might not 
have usurped all the powers of government 
without exciting a murmur. Whatever 
rank as a commander history may assign 
him, it is certain that no military chieftain 
was ever more perfect master than he of 
the hearts of his followers. When he ap- 
peared in the presence of troops he was 
sometimes cheered vociferously, but far 
more frequently his coming was greeted 



Lee^ Jackson, ajtd Others. 145 

with a profound silence, which expressed 
much more truly than cheers could have 
done the well - nigh rehgious reverence 
with which the men regarded his person. 

General Lee had a sententious way of 
saying things which made all his utter- 
ances peculiarly forceful. His language was 
always happily chosen, and a single sen- 
tence from his hps often left nothing more 
to be said. As good an example of this 
as any, perhaps, was his comment upon the 
military genius of General Meade. Not 
very long after that officer took command 
of the army of the Potomac, a skirmish 
occurred, and none of General Lee's staff 
officers being present, an acquaintance of 
mine was detailed as his personal aid for 
the day, and I am indebted to him for the 
anecdote. Some one asked our chief what 
he thought of the new leader on the other 
side, and in reply Lee said, " General Meade 
will commit no blunder in my front, and if 
I commit one he will make haste to take 



146 A Rebel's Recollections. 

advantage of it." It is difficult to see what 
more he could have said on the subject. 

I saw him for the last time during the 
war, at Amelia Court House, in the midst 
of the final retreat, and I shall never forget 
the heart-broken expression his face wo.-e, 
or the still sadder tones of his voice as he 
gave me the instructions I had come to 
ask. The army was in utter confusion. It 
was already evident that we were being 
beaten back upon James River and could 
never hope to reach the Roanoke, on which 
stream alone there might be a possibility 
of making a stand. General Sheridan was 
harassing our broken columns at every 
step, and destroying us piecemeal. Worse 
than all, General Lee had been deserted by 
the terrified government in the very mo- 
ment of his supreme need, and the food 
had been snatched from the mouths of the 
famished troops (as is more fully explained 
in another chapter) that the flight of the 
president and his followers might be has- 



Lee, yackso7i, a^id Oihi^rs, 147 

tened. The load put thus up(^n Lee's 
shoulders was a very heavy or .r so 
conscientious a man as he to b a: ; and 
knowing:, as every Southerner c >e.s, his 
habit of taking upon himself all t ::■]!; e for 
whatever went awry, we canno' onder 
that he was sinking under the bui i ■ His 
face vv^as still calm, as it always was, but his 
carriage was no longer erect, as his -oldiers 
had been used to see it. The tronbles of 
those last days had already plowrj great 
furrows in his forehead. His eyes were 
red as if with weeping ; his cheehs sunken 
and haggard ; his face colorless. >: o one 
who looked upon him then, as b^ stood 
there in full view of the disastrous e,ul,'can 
ever forget the intense agony written upon 
his features. And yet he was calm, self- 
possessed, and deliberate. Failure and the 
sufferings of his men grieved him sorely, 
but they could not daunt him, and his 
moral greatness was never more manifest 
than during those last terrible days. Even 



148 ^1 RebeVs Recollectiofis, 

in the ujal correspondence with General 
Grant. Tree's manliness and courage and 
ability v-. endure lie on the surface, and it 
is not tiij least honorable thing in General 
Grant's history that he showed himself 
capah; / r>\ appreciating the character of this 
manl ;nan, as he did when he returned 

Lee's .'.riendered sword with the remark 
that hj knew of no one so worthy as its 
owner o wear it. 

Afte; the war the man who had com- 
manded che Southern armies remained 
master ^f all Southern hearts, and there 
can be no doubt that the wise advice he 
gave ' y reply to the hundreds of letters 
sent (-im prevented many mistakes and 
much suifering. The young men of the 
South were naturally disheartened, and a 
general exodus to Mexico, Brazil, and the 
Argentine Republic was seriously contem- 
plated. General Lee's advice, " Stay at 
home, go to work, and hold your land," 
effectually prevented this saddest of all 



Lee^ Jacks 071^ and Others, 149 

blunders ; and his example was no less 
efficacious than his words, in recommend- 
inof a dilisrent attention to business as the 
best possible cure for the evils wrought by 
the war. 

From the chieftain who commanded our 
armies to his son and successor in the 
presidency of Washington-Lee University, 
the transition is a natural one ; and, while 
it is my purpose, in these reminiscences, 
to say as little as possible of men still liv- 
ing, I may at least refer to General G. W. 
Custis Lee as the only man I ever heard 
of who tried to decline a promotion from 
brigadier to major general, for the reason 
that he thought there were others better 
entitled than he to the honor. I have it 
from good authority that President Davis 
went in person to young Lee's head- 
quarters to entreat a reconsideration of 
that officer's determination to refuse the 
honor, and that he succeeded with diffi- 
culty in pressing the promotion upon the 



150 A Rebel's Recollections. 

singularly modest gentleman. Whether 
or not this younger Lee has inherited his 
father's military genius we have no means 
of knowing, but we are left in no uncer- 
tainty as to his possession of his father's 
manliness and modesty, and personal 
worth. 

Jackson was always a surprise. Nobody 
ever understood him, and nobody has ever 
been quite able to account for him. The 
members of his own staff, of whom I hap- 
pen to have known one or two intimately, 
seem to have failed, quite as completely as 
the rest of the world, to penetrate his sin- 
gular and contradictory character. His bi- 
ographer, Mr. John Esten Cooke, read him 
more perfectly perhaps than any one else, 
but even he, in writing of the hero, evi- 
dently views him from the outside. Dr. 
Dabney, another of Jackson's historians, 
gives us a glimpse of the man, in one sin- 
gle aspect of his character, which may be a 
clew to the whole. He says there are three 



Lee, Jackson, and Others. 151 

kinds of courage, of which two only are 
bravery. These three varieties of courage 
are, first, that of the man who is simply in- 
sensible of danger ; second, that of men 
who, understanding, appreciating, and fear- 
ing danger, meet it boldly nevertheless, 
from motives of pride ; and third, the cour- 
age of men keenly alive to danger, who face 
it simply from a high sense ofduty.i Of 
this latter kind, the biographer tells us, was 
Jackson's courage, and certainly there can > 
be no better clew to his character than this. 
Whatever other mysteries there may have 
been about the man, it is clear that his 
well-nigh morbid devotion to duty was his 
ruling characteristic. 

But nobody ever understood him fully, 
and he was a perpetual surprise to friend 
and foe alike. The cadets and the grad- 
uates of the Virginia Military Institute, 

1 As I have no copy of Dr. Dabney's work by me, and 
have seen none for about ten years, I cannot pretend to 
quote the passage ; but I have given its substance in my 
own words. 



152 A Rebel's Recollections. 

who had known him as a professor there, 
held him in small esteem at the outset. I 
talked with many of them, and found no 
dissent whatever from the opinion that 
General Gilham and General Smith were 
the great men of the institute, and that 
Jackson, whom they irreverently nicknamed 
Tom Fool Jackson, could never be any- 
thing more than a martinet colonel, half 
soldier and half preacher. They were unan- 
imous in prophesying his greatness after 
the fact, but of the two or three score with 
whom I talked on the subject at the begin- 
ning of the war, not one even suspected its 
possibility until after he had won his so- 
briquet " Stonewall " at Manassas. 

It is natural enough that such a man 
should be credited in the end with qualities 
which he did not possess, and that much 
of the praise awarded him should be im- 
properly placed ; and in his case this seems 
to have been the fact. He is much more 
frequently spoken of as the great marcher 



Lee, Jackson, and Others, 153 

than as the great fighter of the Confed- 
erate armies, and it is commonly said 
that he had an especial genius for being 
always on time. And yet General Lee 
himself said in the presence of a distin- 
guished officer from v/hose lips I heard it, 
that Jackson was by no means so rapid a 
marcher as Longstreet, and that he had an 
unfortunate habit of never being on time. 
Without doubt he was, next to Lee, the 
greatest military genius we had, and his 
system of grand tactics was more Napo- 
leonic than was that of any other officer on 
either side ; but it would appear from this 
that while he has not been praised beyond 
his deserving, he has at least been com- 
mended mistakenly. 

The affection his soldiers bore him has 
always been an enigma. He was stern and 
hard as a disciplinarian, cold in his man- 
ner, unprepossessing in appearance, and 
utterly lacking in the apparent enthusiasm 
which excites enthusiasm in others. He 



154 ^ Rebel's Recollections. 

had never been able to win the affection of 
the cadets at Lexington, and had hardly 
won even their respect. And yet his sol- 
diers almost worshiped him. Perhaps it 
was because he was so terribly in earnest, 
or it may have been because he was so 
generally successful, — for there are few 
things men admire more than success, — 
but whatever the cause was, no fact could 
be more evident than that Stonewall Jack- 
son was the most enthusiastically loved 
man, except Lee, in the Confederate serv- 
ice, and that he shared with Lee the gen- 
erous admiration even of his foes. His 
strong religious bent, his devotion to a 
form of religion the most gloomy, — for his 
Calvinism amounted to very little less than 
fatalism, and his men called him " old blue- 
light," — his strictness of life, and his utter 
lack of vivacity and humor, would have 
been an impassable barrier between any 
other man and such troops as he com- 
manded. He was Cromwell at the head of 



Lee, Jacksoit, and Others. 155 

an army composed of men of the world, and 
there would seem to have been nothing in 
common between him and them ; and yet 
Cromwell's psalm-singing followers never 
held their chief in higher regard or heartier 
affection than that with which these rollick- 
ing young planters cherished their sad-eyed 
and sober-faced leader. They even rejoiced 
in his extreme religiosity, and held it in 
some sort a work of supererogation, suf- 
ficient to atone for their own worldly-mind- 
edness. They were never more devoted 
to him than when transgressing the very 
principles upon which his life was ordered ; 
and when any of his men indulged in dram- 
drinking, a practice from which he always 
rigidly abstained, his health was sure to 
be the first toast given. On one occa- 
sion, a soldier who had imbibed enthu- 
siasm with his whisky, feeling the inade- 
quacy of the devotion shown by drinking to 
an absent chief, marched, canteen in hand, . 
to Jackson's tent, and gaining admission 



156 A Rebel's Recollections. 

proposed as a sentiment, " Here 's to you, 
general ! May I live to see you stand on 
the highest pinnacle of Mount Ararat, and 
hear you give the command, * By the right 
of nations front into empires, — worlds, 
right face ! ' " 

I should not venture to relate this anec- 
dote at all, did I not get it at first hands 
from an officer who was present at the 
time. It will serve, at least, to show the 
sentiments of extravagant admiration with 
which Jackson's men regarded him, whether 
it shall be sufficient to bring a smile to the 
reader's lips or not. 

The first time I ever saw General Ewell, 
I narrowly missed making it impossible 
that there should ever be a Genej-al Ewell 
at all. He was a colonel then, and was in 
command of the camp of instruction at 
Ashland. I was posted as a sentinel, and 
my orders were peremptory to permit no- 
body to ride through the gate at which I 
was stationed. Colonel Ewell, dressed in 



Lee, Jackson, and Others. 157 

a rough citizen's suit, without side-arms 
or other insignia of military rank, under- 
took to pass the forbidden portal. I com- 
manded him to halt, but he cursed me in- 
stead, and attempted to ride over me. 
Drawing my pistol, cocking it, and placing 
its muzzle against his breast, I replied with 
more of vigor than courtesy in my speech, 
and forced him back, threatening and firmly 
intending to pull my trigger if he should 
resist in the least. He yielded himself to 
arrest, and I called the officer of the guard. 
Ewell was livid with rage, and ordered the 
officer to place me in irons at once, utter- 
ing maledictions upon me which it would 
not do to repeat here. The officer of the 
guard was a manly fellow, however, and re- 
fused even to remove me from the post. 

" The sentinel has done only his duty," 
he replied, " and if he had shot you. Colonel 
Ewell, you would have had only yourself to 
blame. I have here your written order that 
the sentinels at this gate shall allow nobody 



158 A Rebel's Recollections. 

to pass through it on horseback, on any 
pretense whatever ; and yet you come in 
citizen's clothes, a stranger to the guard, 
and try to ride him down when he insists 
upon obeying the orders you have given 
him." 

The sequel to the occurrence proved 
that, in spite of his infirm temper, Ewell 
was capable of being a just man, as he cer- 
tainly was a brave one. He sent for me a 
little later, when he received his commis- 
sion as a brigadier, and apologizing for the 
indignity with which he had treated me, 
offered me a desirable place upon his staff, 
which, with a still rankling sense of the in- 
justice he had done me, I declined to ac- 
cept. 

General Ewell was at this time the most 
violently and elaborately profane man I ever 
knew. Elaborately, I say, because his pro- 
fanity did not consist of single or even 
double oaths, but was ingeniously wrought 
into whole sentences. It was profanity 



Lee^ Jackson^ and Others, 159 

which might be parsed, and seemed the 
result of careful study and long practice. 
Later in the war he became a religious 
man, but before that time his genius for 
swearing was phenomenal. An anecdote 
is told of him, for the truth of which I can- 
not vouch, but which certainly is sufficient- 
ly characteristic to be true. It is said that 
on one occasion, the firing having become 
unusually heavy, a chaplain who had la- 
bored to convert the general, or at least to 
correct the aggressive character of his wick- 
edness, remarked that as he could be of no 
service where he was, he would seek a less 
exposed place, whereupon Ewell remarked : 

" Why, chaplain, you 're the most incon- 
sistent man I ever saw. You say you 're 
anxious to get to heaven above all things, 
and now that you 've got the best chance 
you ever had to go, you run away from it 
just as if you 'd rather not make the trip, 
after all." 

I saw nothing of General Ewell after he 



i6o A Rebels Recollections. 

left Ashland, early in the summer of 1861, 
until I met him in the winter of 1864-65. 
Some enormous rifled guns had been 
mounted at Chaffin's Bluff, below Rich- 
mond, and I went from my camp near by 
to see them tested. General Ewell was 
present, and while the firing was in prog- 
ress he received a dispatch saying that the. 
Confederates had been victorious in an en- 
gagement between Mackey's Point and Po- 
-cotaligo. As no State was mentioned in 
the dispatch, and the places named were 
obscure ones. General Ewell was unable to 
guess in what part of the country the action 
had been fought. He read the dispatch 
aloud, and. asked if any one present could 
tell him where Mackey's Point and Poco- 
taligo were. Having served for a consid- 
erable time on the coast of South Carolina, 
I was able to give him the information he 
sought. When I had finished he looked at 
me intently for a moment, and then asked, 
" Are n't you the man who came so near 
shooting me at Ashland } " 



Lee, Jackson, and Others. i6i 

I replied that I was. 

'* I 'm very glad you did n't do it," he 
said. 

" So am I," I replied ; and that was all 
that was said on either side. 

The queerest of all the military men I 
met or saw during the war was General 
W. H. H. Walker, of Georgia. I saw very 
little of him, but that little impressed me 
strongly. He was a peculiarly belligerent 
man, and if he could have been kept always 
in batt'.e he would have been able doubtless 
to keep the peace as regarded his fellows 
and his superiors. As certain periods of 
inaction are necessary in all wars, however, 
General Walker was forced to maintain a 
state of hostility toward those around and 
above him. During the first campaign he 
got into a newspaper war with the pres- 
ident and Mr. Benjamin, in which he han- 
dled both of those gentlemen rather rough- 
ly, but failing to move them from the posi- 
tion they had taken with regard to his pro- 



1 62 A RebeVs Recollections, 

motion, — that being the matter in dispute, 
— he resigned his commission, and took 
service as a brigadier-general under author- 
ity of the governor of Georgia. In this 
capacity he v^as at one time in command 
of the city of Savannah, and it was there 
that I saw him for the first and only time, 
just before the reduction of Fort Pulaski 
by General Gilmore. The reading-room of 
the Pulaski House was crowded with guests 
of the hotel and evening loungers from the 
city, when General Walker came in. He 
at once began to talk, not so much to the 
one or two gentlemen with whom he had 
just shaken hands, as to the room full of 
strangers and the public generally. He 
spoke in a loud voice and with the tone 
and manner of a bully and a braggart, 
which I am told he was not at all. 

" You people are very brave at arms- 
length," he said, "provided it is a good 
long arms-length. You are n't a bit afraid 
of the shells fired at Fort Pulaski, and you 



Lee^ Jacks on, a7id Others, 163 

talk as boldly as FalstafF over his sack, 
now. But what will you do when the Yan- 
kee gun-boats come up the river and be- 
gin to throw hot shot into Savannah ? I 
know what you '11 do. You '11 get dread- 
fully uneasy about your plate-glass mirrors 
and your fine furniture ; and I give you fair 
warning now that if you want to save your 
mahogany you 'd better be carting it off up 
country at once, for I '11 never surrender 
anything more than the ashes of Savannah. 
I '11 stay here, and I '11 keep you here, till 
every shingle burns and every brick gets 
knocked into bits the size of my thumb- 
nail, and then I '11 send the Yankees word 
that there isn't any Savannah to surren- 
der. Now I mean this, every word of 
it. But you don't believe it, and the first 
time a gun-boat comes in sight you '11 all 
come to me and say, ' General, we can't 
fight gun-boats with any hope of success, 
— don't you think we 'd better surrender } ' 
Do you know what I '11 do then 1 I 've had 



164 A Rebel's Recollections^ 

a convenient limb trimmed up, on the tree 
in front of my head-quarters, and I '11 string 
up every man that dares say surrender, or 
anything else beginning with an ^." 

And so he went on for an hour or more, 
greatly to the amusement of the crowd. I 
am told by those who knew him best that 
his statement of his purposes was probably 
not an exaggerated one, and that if he had 
been charged with the defense of the city 
against a hostile fleet, he would have made 
just such a resolute resistance as that 
which he promised. His courage and en- 
durance had been abundantly proved in 
Mexico, at any rate, and nobody who knew 
him ever doubted either. 

Another queer character, though in a 
very different way, was General Ripley, 
who for a long time commanded the city 
of Charleston. He was portly in person, 
of commanding and almost pompous pres- 
ence, and yet, when one came to know him, 
was as easy and unassuming in manner as 



Lee, Jackson, and Others, 165 

if he had not been a brigadier-general at 
all. I had occasion to call upon him offi- 
cially, a number of times, and this afforded 
me an excellent opportunity to study his 
character and manners. On the morning 
after the armament of Fort Ripley was car- 
ried out to the Federal fleet by the crew of 
the vessel on which it had been placed, I 
spent an hour or two in General Ripley's 
head-quarters, waiting for something or 
other, though I have quite forgotten what. 
I amused myself looking through his tele- 
scope at objects in the harbor. Presently 
I saw a ship's launch, bearing a white flag, 
approach Fort Sumter. I mentioned the 
matter to my companion, and General Rip- 
ley, overhearing the remark, came quickly 
to the glass. A moment later he said to 
his signal operator, — 

"Tell Fort Sumter if that's a Yankee 
boat to burst her wide open, flag or no 
flag." The message had no sooner gone, 
however, than it was recalled, and instruc- 



1 66 A Rebel's Recollections. 

tions more in accordance with the rules of 
civilized warfare substituted. 

General Ripley stood less upon rule and 
held red tape in smaller regard than any 
other brigadier I ever met. My company 
was at that time an independent battery, 
belonging to no battalion and subject to no 
intermediate authority between that of its 
captain and that of the commanding gen- 
eral. It had but two commissioned officers 
on duty, and I, as its sergeant-major, acted 
as a sort of adjutant, making my reports 
directly to General Ripley's head-quarters. 
One day I reported the fact that a large 
part of our harness was unfit for further 
use. 

" Well, why don't you call a board of sur- 
vey and have it condemned 1 " he asked. 

" How can we, general 1 We do not 
belong to any battalion, and so have nobody 
to call the board or to compose it, either." 

" Let your captain call it then, and put 
your own officers on it." 



Lee^ Jackson^ and Others. i6j 

" But we have only one officer, general, 
besides the captain, and there must be 
three on the board, while the officer calling 
it cannot be one of them." 

" Oh, the deuce ! " he replied. " What 's 
the difference } The harness ain't fit for 
use and there 's plenty of new in the 
arsenal. Let your captain call a board 
consisting of the lieutenant and you and a 
sergeant. It ain't legal, of course, to put 
any but commissioned officers on, but I tell 
you to do it, and one pair of shoulder-straps 
is worth more now than a court-house full 
of habeas corpuses. Write 'sergeant' so 
that nobody can read it, and I '11 make my 
clerks mistake it for ' lieutenant ' in copy- 
ing. Get your board together, go on to 
say that after a due examination, and all 
that, the board respectfully reports that it 
finds the said harness not worth a damn, 
or words to that effect ; send in your report 
and I '11 approve it, and you '11 have a new 
set of harness in three days. What 's the 



1 68 A Rebel's Recollections. 

use of pottering around with technicalities 
when the efficiency of a battery is at 
stake ? We 're not lawyers, but soldiers." 
The speech was a peculiarly character- 
istic one, and throughout his administration 
of affairs in Charleston, General Ripley 
showed this disposition to promote the 
good of the service at the expense of rou- 
tine. He was not a good martinet, but he 
was a brave, earnest man and a fine officer, 
of a sort of which no army can have too 
many. 



CHAPTER VII. 

SOME QUEER PEOPLE. 

Generals would be of small worth, in- 
deed, if there were no lesser folk than 
they in service, and the interesting people 
one meets in an army do not all wear 
sashes, by any means. The composition 
of the battery in which I served for a con- 
siderable time afforded me an opportunity 
to study some rare characters, of a sort not 
often met with in ordinary life, and as 
these men interested me beyond measure, 
I have a mind to sketch a few of them here 
in the hope that their oddities may prove 
equally entertaining to my readers. 

In the late autumn of 1861, after a sum- 
mer with Stuart, circumstances, with an 
explanation of which it is not necessary 
now to detain the reader, led me to seek a 



170 A Rebel's Recollections. 

transfer to a light battery, in which I was 
almost an entire stranger. When I joined 
this new command, the men were in a state 
of partial mutiny, the result of a failure to 
receive their pay and clothing allowance. 
The trouble was that there was no one in 
the battery possessed of sufficient clerical 
skill to make out a proper muster and pay 
roll. Several efforts had been made, but to 
no purpose, and when I arrived the camp 
was in a state of turmoil. The men were 
for the most part illiterate mountaineers, 
and no explanations which the officers were 
able to give served to disabuse their minds 
of the thought that they were being swin- 
dled in some way. Learning what the 
difficulty was, I volunteered my services for 
the clerical work required, and two hours 
after my arrival I had the pleasure of pay- 
ing off the men and restoring peace to the 
camp. Straightway the captain made me 
sergeant-major, and the men wanted to 
make me captain. The popularity won 



Some Queer People. 171 

thus in the outset served me many a good 
turn, not the least of which I count the 
opportunity it gave me to study the char- 
acters of the men, whose confidant and 
adviser I became in all matters of difficulty. 
I deciphered the letters they received from 
home and wrote replies from their dicta- 
tion, and there were parts of this corre- 
spondence which would make my fortune 
as a humorous writer, if I could reproduce 
here the letters received now and then. 

The men, as I have said, were for the 
most part illiterate mountaineers, with just 
a sufficient number of educated gentlemen 
among them (mostly officers and non-com- 
missioned officers) to join each other in a 
laugh at the oddity of the daily life in the 
camp. The captain had been ambitious at 
one time of so increasing the company as 
to make a battalion of it, and to that end 
had sought recruits in all quarters. Among 
others he had enlisted seven genuine ruf- 
fians whom he had found in a Richmond 



172 A Rebel's Recollections, 

jail, and who enlisted for the sake of a 
release from durance. These men formed 
a little clique by themselves, a sort of 
miniature New York sixth ward society, 
which afforded me a singularly interesting 
social study, of a kind rarely met with by 
any but home missionaries and police au- 
thorities. There were enough of them to 
form a distinct criminal class, so that I had 
opportunity to study their Hfe as a whole, 
and not merely the phenomena presented 
by isolated specimens. 

All of these seven men had seen service 
somewhere, and except as regarded turbu- 
lence and utter unmanageability they were 
excellent soldiers. Jack Delaney, or " one- 
eyed Jack Delaney," as he was commonly 
called, was a tall, muscular, powerful fellow, 
who had lost an eye in a street fight, and 
was quite prepared to sacrifice the other in 
the same way at any moment. Tommy 
Martin was smaller and plumper than Jack, 
but not one whit less muscular or less des- 



Some Queer People. 173 

perately belligerent. Tim Considine was 
simply a beauty. He was not more than 
twenty-one years of age, well-built, with a 
fair, pearly, pink and white complexion, 
regular features, exquisite eyes, and a sin- 
gularly shapely and well-poised head. His 
face on any woman's shoulders would have 
made her a beauty and a belle in a Brook- 
lyn drawing-room. I group these three 
together because they are associated with 
each other in my mind. They messed to- 
gether, and occupied one tent. Never a 
day passed which brought with it no battle 
royal between two or all three of them. 
These gentlemen, — for that is what they 
uniformly called themselves, though they 
pronounced the word "gints," — were born 
in Baltimore. I have their word for this, 
else I should never have suspected the fact. 
Their names were of Hibernian mold. They 
spoke the English language with as pretty 
a brogue as ever echoed among the hills of 
Galway. They were much given to such 



174 ^ Rebel's Recollectiojis, 
expletives as "faith" and "be me sowl," 
and " be jabers," and moreover they were 
always " afther " doing something ; but they 
were born in Baltimore, nevertheless, for 
they solemnly told me so. 

I am wholly unable to give the reader 
any connected account of the adventures 
and life struggles through which these men 
had passed, for the reason that I was never 
able to win their full and unreserved con- 
fidence ; but I caught glimpses of their past, 
here and there, from which I think it safe 
to assume that their personal histories had 
been of a dramatic, not to say of a sensa- 
tional sort. My battery was sent one day 
to Bee's Creek, on the South Carolina 
coast, to meet an anticipated advance of the 
enemy. No enemy came, however, and we 
lay there on the sand, under a scorching 
sub-tropical sun, in a swarm of sand-flies so 
dense that many of our horses died of their 
stings, while neither sleep nor rest was 
possible to the men. A gun-boat lay just 



Some Queer People, 175 

out of reach beyond a point in the inlet, 
annoying us by throwing at us an occa- 
sional shell of about the size and shape of 
a street lamp. Having a book with me I 
sought a place under a caisson for the sake 
of the shade, and spent an hour or two in 
reading. While I was there, Jack Delaney 
and Tommy Martin, knowing nothing of 
my presence, took seats on the ammunition 
chests, and fell to talking. 

" An' faith, Tommy," said Jack, " an' it 
is n't this sort of foightin' I 'm afther loikin' 
at all, bad luck to it." 

"An' will ye tell me, Jack," said his 
companion, " what sort of foightin' it is, ye 
loikes } " 

" Ah, Tommy, it 's mesilf that loikes the 
raal foightin'. Give me an open sea, an' 
close qtiartherSy an' a black flag, Tommy, 
an' that 's the sort of foightin' I 'm afther 
loikin', sure." 

"A - an' I believe it 's a poirate ye are, 
Jack." 



176 A RebeVs Recollections. 

" You 're roight, Tommy ; it 's a poirate 
I am, ivery inch o' me ! " 

Here was a glimpse of the man's char- 
acter which proved also a hint of his life 
story, as I afterwards learned. He had 
been a pirate, and an English court, discov- 
ering the fact, had "ordered his funeral," 
as he phrased it, but by some means or 
other he had secured a pardon on condition 
of his enlistment in the British navy, from 
which he had deserted at the first oppor- 
tunity. Jack was very much devoted to 
his friends, and especially to those above 
him in social or military rank ; and a more 
loyal fellow I never knew. The captain of 
the battery and I were tent mates and 
mess mates, and although we kept a com- 
petent negro servant. Jack insisted upon 
blacking our boots, stretching our tent, 
brushing our clothes, looking after our fire, 
and doing a hundred other services of the 
sort, for which he could never be persuaded 
to accept compensation of any kind. 



Some Queer People. 177 

When we arrived in Charleston for the 
first time, on our way to the post assigned 
us at Coosawhatchie, we were obHged to 
remain a whole day in the city, awaiting 
transportation. Knowing the temper of 
our " criminal class," we were obliged to 
confine all the men strictly within camp 
boundaries, lest our Baltimore Irishmen 
and their fellows should get drunk and give 
us trouble. We peremptorily refused to 
let any of the men pass the line of sentinels, 
but Jack Delaney, being in sad need of a 
pair of boots, was permitted to go into the 
city in company with the captain. That 
officer guarded him carefully, and as they 
were returning to camp the captain, think- 
ing that there could be no danger in allow- 
ing the man one dram, invited him to drink 
at a hotel counter. 

" Give us your very best whisky," he 
said to the man behind the bar ; whereupon 
that functionary placed a decanter and two 
glasses before them. 



178 A Rebel's Recollections. 

Jack's one eye flashed fire instantly, 
and jumping upon the counter he screamed, 
" What d' ye mean, ye bloody spalpeen, by 
insultin' me captain in that way ? I 'II 
teach ye your manners, ye haythen." The 
captain could not guess the meaning of the 
Irishman's wrath, but he interfered for the 
protection of the frightened servitor, and 
asked Jack what he meant. 

" What do I mean ? An' sure an' I mean 
to break his bit of a head, savin' your pres- 
ence, captain. I '11 teach him not to insult 
me captain before me very eyes, by givin' 
him the same bottle he gives Jack Delaney 
to drink out of. An' sure an' me moother 
learnt me betther manners nor to presume 
to drink from the same bottle with me 
betthers." 

The captain saved the bar-tender from 
the effects of Jack's wrath, but failed utterly 
to convince that well-bred Irish gentleman 
that no offense against good manners had 
been committed. He refused to drink from 



Some Queer People, 179 

the " captain's bottle," and a separate de- 
canter was provided for him. 

On another occasion Jack went with one 
of the officers to a tailor's shop, and, with- 
out apparent cause, knocked the knight of 
the shears down and was proceeding to 
beat him, when the officer commanded him 
to desist. 

" An' sure if your honor says he 's had 
enough, I '11 quit, but I 'd loike to murdher 
him." 

Upon being questioned as to the cause 
of his singular behavior, he explained that 
the tailor had shown unpardonably bad 
manners by keeping his hat on his head 
while taking the lieutenant's measure. 

These men were afraid of nothing and 
respected nothing but rank ; but their re- 
gard for that was sufficiently exaggerated 
perhaps to atone for their short-comings in 
other respects. A single chevron on a 
man's sleeve made them at once his obedi- 
ent servants, and never once, even in their 



i8o A RebeVs Recollections. 

cups, did they resist constituted authority, 
directly asserted. For general rules they 
had no respect whatever. Anything which 
assumed the form of law they violated as a 
matter of course, if not, as I suspect, as a 
matter of conscience ; but the direct com- 
mand of even a corporal was held binding 
always. Jack Delaney, who never diso- 
beyed any order delivered to him in person, 
used to swim the Ashley River every night, 
at imminent risk of being eaten by sharks, 
chiefly because it was a positive violation 
of orders to cross at all from our camp on 
Wappoo Creek to Charleston. 

Tommy Martin and Tim Considine were 
bosom friends, and inseparable companions. 
They fought each other frequently, but 
these little episodes worked no ill to their 
friendship. One day they quarreled about 
something, and Considine, drawing a huge 
knife from his belt, rushed upon Martin 
with evident murderous intent. Martin, 
planting himself firmly, dealt his antagonist 



Some Queer People, i8i 

a blow exactly between the eyes, which laid 
him at full length on the ground. I ran at 
once to command the peace, but before I 
got to the scene of action I heard Considine 
call out, from his supine position, — 

" Bully for you. Tommy ! I niver knew 
a blow better delivered in me loife ! " And 
that ended the dispute. 

One night, after taps, a fearful hubbub 
arose in the Irish quarter of the camp, and 
running to the place, the captain, a corporal, 
and I managed to separate the combatants ; 
but as Jack Delaney had a great butcher 
knife in his hands with which it appeared 
he had already severely cut another Irish- 
man, Dan Gorman by name, we thought 
it best to bind him with a prolonge. 
He submitted readily, lying down on the 
ground to be tied. While we were draw- 
ing the rope around him, Gorman, a giant 
in size and strength, leaned over us and 
dashed a brick with all his force into the 
prostrate man's face. Had it struck his 



1 82 A Rebel's Recollections. 

skull it must have killed him instantly, as 
indeed we supposed for a time that it had. 

" What do you mean by that, sir ? " 
asked the captain, seizing Gorman by the 
collar. 

Pointing to a fearful gash in his own 
neck, the man replied, — 

" Don't ye see I 'm a dead man, captain } 
An' sure an' do ye think Fm gohi to hell 
uuidoiU me pardnerf " 

The tone of voice in which the question 
was asked clearly indicated that in his 
view nothing could possibly be more utterly 
preposterous than such a supposition. 

Charley Lear belonged to this party, 
though he was not a Celt, but an English- 
man. Charley was a tailor by trade and 
a desperado in practice. He had kept a 
bar in Vicksburg, had dug gold in Cali- 
fornia, and had " roughed it " in various 
other parts of the world. His was a 
scarred breast, showing seven knife thrusts 
and the marks of two bullets, one of which 



Some Queer People, 183 

had passed entirely through him. And 
yet he was in perfect health and strength. 
He was a man of considerable intelligence 
and fair education, whose association with 
ruffians was altogether a matter of choice. 
He was in no sense a criminal, I think, and 
while I knew him, at least, was perfectly 
peaceful. But he liked rough company 
and sought it diligently, taking the conse- 
quences when they came. He professed 
great regard and even affection for me, 
because I had done him a rather important 
service once. 

Finding it impossible to govern these 
men without subjecting the rest of the 
company to a much severer discipline than 
was otherwise necessary or desirable, we 
secured the transfer of our ruffians to an- 
other command in the fall of 1862, and I 
saw no more of any of them until after the 
close of the war. I went into a tailor's 
shop in Memphis one day, during the win- 
ter of 1865-66, to order a suit of clothing. 



184 A Rebel's Recollections, 

After selecting the goods I was asked to 
step up-stairs to be measured. While the 
cutter was using his tape upon me, one 
of the journeymen on the great bench at 
the end of the room suddenly dropped 
his work, and, bounding forward, hterally 
clasped me in his arms, giving me a hug 
which a grizzly bear might be proud of. It 
was Charley Lear, of course, and I had the 
utmost difficulty in refusing his offer to pay 
for the goods and make my clothes himself 
without charge. 

Our assortment of queer people was a 
varied one, and among the rest there were 
two ex-circus actors. Jack Hawkins and 
Colonel Denton, to wit. Hawkins was an 
inoffensive and even a timid fellow, whose 
delight it was to sing bold robber songs in 
the metalhc voice peculiar to vocalists of 
the circus. There was something inex- 
pressibly ludicrous in the contrast between 
the bloody - mindedness of his songs and 
the gentle shyness and timidity of the 



Some Queer People. 185 

man who sang them. Everybody domi- 
neered over him, and he was especially 
oppressed in the presence of our other 
ex-clown, whose assumption of superior 
wisdom and experience often overpowered 
stronger men than poor John Hawkins ever 
was. Denton was one of those men who 
are sure, in one way or another, to become 
either " colonel " or "judge." He was sixty- 
five years old when I first knew him, and 
had been ''the colonel" longer than any- 
body could remember. He was of good 
parentage, and until he ran away with a 
circus at the age of eleven had lived among 
genteel people. His appearance and man- 
ner were imposing always, and never more 
so than when he was drunk. He buttoned 
his coat with the air of a man who is about 
to ride over broad ancestral acres, and ate 
his dinner, whatever it might consist of, 
with all the dignity of a host who does his 
guests great honor in entertaining them. 
He was an epicure in his tastes, of course, 



1 86 A Rebel's Recollectioiis. 

and delighted to describe peculiarly well- 
prepared dinners which he said he had 
eaten in company with especially distin- 
guished gentlemen. He was an expert, 
too, he claimed, in the preparation of salads 
and the other arts of a like nature in which 
fine gentlemen like to excel even profes- 
sional cooks. When rations happened to 
be more than ordinarily limited in quantity 
or worse than usual in quality, Denton was 
sure to visit various messes while they were 
at dinner, and regale them with a highly 
wrought description of an imaginary feast 
from which he would profess to have risen 
ten minutes before. 

"You ought to have dined with me to- 
day," he would say. " I had a deviled 
leg of turkey, and some beautiful broiled 
oysters with Spanish olives. I never eat 
broiled oysters without olives. You try it 
sometime, and you '11 never regret it. Then 
I had a stuffed wild goose's liver. Did you 
ever eat one t Well, you don't know what 



Some Queer People, 187 

a real titbit is, then. Not stuffed in the 
ordinary way, but stuffed scientifically and 
cooked in a way you never saw it done be- 
fore." And thus he would go on, naming 
impossible viands and describing prepos- 
terous processes of cookery, until " cooked 
in a way you never saw it done before " 
became a proverb in the camp. The old 
sinner would do all this on an empty stom- 
ach too, and I sometimes fancied he found 
in the delights of his imaginary banquets 
some compensation for the short rations 
and hard fare of his actual experience. 

He was in his glory, however, only when 
he was away from camp and among stran- 
gers. He always managed to impress peo- 
ple who didn't know him with his great 
wealth and prominence. I overheard him 
once, in the office of the Charleston Hotel, 
inviting some gentlemen to visit and dine 
with him. 

" Come out this evening," he said, " to 
my place in Charleston Neck, and take a 



1 88 A RebeVs Recollections. 

bachelor dinner with me. I 've just got 
some duck from Virginia, — canvas -back, 
you know, — and my steward will be sure to 
have something else good on hand. I Ve 
got some good madeira too, that I imported 
myself. Now you '11 not disappoint me, 
will you } And after dinner we '11 have a 
turn at billiards : I 've just had my tables 
overhauled. But you '11 have to excuse me 
long enough now for me to ride down and 
tell the major to take care of things in camp 
till morning." 

And with that he gave them an address 
in the aristocratic quarter of Charleston, 
leaving them to meditate upon the good 
luck they had fallen upon in meeting this 
wealthy and hospitable " colonel." 

Denton was an inveterate gambler, and 
was in the habit of winning a good deal of 
money from the men after pay-day. One 
day he gave some sound advice to a young 
man from whom he had just taken a watch 
in settlement of a score. 



Some Queer People, 189 

"Now let me give you some advice, 
Bill," he said. " I 've seen a good deal of 
this kind of thing, and I know what I 'm 
talking about. You play fair now, and you 
always lose. You 'II win after a while if 
you keep on, but I tell you, Bill, nobody 
ever can win at cards without cheating. 
You '11 cheat a little after a while, and 
you '11 cheat a good deal before you 've done 
with it. You 'd better quit now, while 
you 're honest, because you '11 cheat if you 
keep on, and when a man cheats at cards 
he '11 steal. Bill. / speak from experienced 
All of which impressed me as a singularly 
frank confession under the circumstances. 

Among other odd specimens we had in 
our battery the most ingenious malingerer 
I ever heard of. He was in service four 
years, drew his pay regularly, was of robust 
frame and in perfect health always, and yet 
during the whole time he was never off the 
sick-Ust for a single day. His capacity to 
endure contempt was wholly unhmited, else 



190 A RebeVs Recollections. 

he would have been shamed by the gibes 
of the men, the sneers of the surgeons, and 
the denunciations of the officers, into some 
show, at least, of a disposition to do duty. 
He spent the greater part of his time in 
hospital, never staying in camp a moment 
longer than he was obliged to do. When 
discharged, as a well man, from one hos- 
pital, he would start toward his command, 
and continue in that direction till he came 
to another infirmary, when he would have 
a relapse at once, and gain admission there. 
Discharged again he would repeat the proc- 
ess at the next hospital, and one day near 
the end of the war he counted up some- 
thing like a hundred different post and 
general hospitals of which he had been an 
inmate, while he had been admitted to 
some of them more than half a dozen times 
each. The surgeons resorted to a variety 
of expedients by which to get rid of him. 
They burned his back with hot coppers ; 
gave him the most nauseous mixtures ; put 



Some Queer People, 191 

him on the lowest possible diet ; treated 
him to cold shower-baths four or five times 
daily ; and did everything else they could 
think of to drive him from the hospitals, 
but all to no purpose. In camp it was 
much the same. On the morning after his 
arrival from hospital he would wake up 
with some totally new ache, and report 
himself upon the sick-list. There was no 
way by which to conquer his obstinacy, 
and, as I have said, he escaped duty to the 
last. 

Another curious case, and one which is 
less easily explained, was that of a much 
more intelligent man, who for more than a 
year feigned every conceivable disease, in 
the hope that he might be discharged the 
service. One or two of us amused our- 
selves with his case, by mentioning in his 
presence the symptoms of some disease of 
which he had never heard, the surgeon 
furnishing us the necessary information, 
and in every case he had the disease within 



192 A Rebel's Recollections. 

less than twenty-four hours. Finally, and 
this was the oddest part of the matter, 
he gave up the attempt, recovered his 
health suddenly, and became one of the 
very best soldiers in the battery, a man 
always ready for duty, and always faithful 
in its discharge. He was made a corporal 
and afterwards a sergeant, and there was 
no better in the battery. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



RED TAPE. 



The history of the Confederacy, when iv 
shall be fully and fairly written, will appear 
the story of a dream to those who shall 
read it, and there are parts of it at least 
which already seem a nightmare to those 
of us who helped make it. Founded upon 
a constitution which jealously withheld 
from it nearly all the powers of govern- 
ment, without even the poor privilege of 
existing beyond the moment when some 
one of the States composing it should see 
fit to put it to death, the Richmond govern- 
ment nevertheless grew speedily into a des- 
potism, and for four years wielded absolute 
power over an obedient and uncomplaining 
people. It tolerated no questioning, brooked 
no resistance, listened to no remonstrance. 
13 



194 ^ Rebel's Recollections, 

It levied taxes of an extraordinary kind 
upon a people already impoverished almost 
to the point of starvation. It made of every 
man a soldier, and extended indefinitely 
every man's term of enlistment. Under 
pretense of enforcing the conscription law 
it established an oppressive system of domi- 
ciliary visits. To preserve order and pre- 
vent desertion it instituted and maintained 
a system of guards and passports, not less 
obnoxious, certainly, than the worst thing 
of the sort ever devised by the most pater- 
nal of despotisms. In short, a government 
constitutionally weak beyond all precedent 
was able for four years to exercise in a 
particularly offensive way all the powers 
of absolutism, and that, too, over a people 
who had been living under republican rule 
for generations. That such a thing was 
possible seems at the first glance a marvel, 
but the reasons for it are not far to seek. 
Despotisms usually ground themselves upon 
the theories of extreme democracy, for one 



Red Tape. i95 

thing, and in this case the consciousness of 
the power to dissolve and destroy the gov- 
ernment at will made the people tolerant of 
its encroachments upon personal and State 
rights ; the more especially, as the presid- 
ing genius of the despotism was the man 
who had refused a promotion to the rank 
of brigadier-general of volunteers during 
the Mexican war, on the ground that the 
general government could not grant such a 
commission without violating the rights of 
a State. The despotism of a government 
presided over by a man so devoted as he 
to State rights seemed less dangerous than 
it might otherwise have appeared. His 
theory was so excellent that people par- 
doned his practice. It is of some parts of 
that practice that we shall speak in the 
present chapter. 

Nothing could possibly be idler than 
speculation upon what might have been ac- 
complished with the resources of the South 
if they had been properly economized and 



196 A Rebel's Recollections. 

wisely used. And yet every Southern man 
must feel tempted to indulge in some such 
speculation whenever he thinks of the sub- 
ject at all, and remembers, as he must, how 
shamefully those resources were wasted 
and how clumsily they were handled in 
every attempt to use them in the prosecu- 
tion of the war. The army was composed, 
as we have seen in a previous chapter, of 
excellent material ; and under the influence 
of field service it soon became a very effi- 
cient body of well-drilled and well-dis- 
ciplined men. The skill of its leaders is 
matter of history, too well known to need 
comment here. But the government con- 
trolling army and leaders was both passive- 
ly and actively incompetent in a surprising 
degree. It did, as nearly as possible, all 
those things which it ought not to have 
done, at the same time developing a really 
marvelous genius for leaving undone those 
things which it ought to have done. The 
story of its incompetence and its presump- 



Red Tape, i(^j 

tion, if it could be adequately told, would 
read like a romance. Its weakness para- 
lyzed the army and people, and its weak- 
ness was the less hurtful side of its char- 
acter. Its full capacity for ill was best 
seen in the extraordinary strength it devel- 
oped whenever action of a wrong-headed 
sort could work disaster, and the only won- 
der is that with such an administration at 
its back the Confederate army was able to 
keep the field at all. I have already had oc- 
casion to explain that the sentiment of the 
South made it the duty of every man who 
could bear arms to go straight to the front 
and to stay there. The acceptance of any 
less actively military position than that of 
a soldier in the field was held to be little 
less than a confession of cowardice; and 
cowardice, in the eyes of the Southerners, 
is the one sin which may not be pardoned 
either in this world or the next. The 
strength of this sentiment it is difficult for 
anybody who did not live in its midst to 



198 A Rebel's Recollections. 

conceive, and its effect was to make worthy 
men spurn everything hke civic position. 
To go where the bullets were whistling was 
the one course open to gentlemen who held 
their honor sacred and their reputation dear. 
And so the offices in Richmond and else- 
where, the bureaus of every sort, on the 
proper conduct of which so much depend- 
ed, were filled with men wiUing to be 
sneered at as dwellers in " bomb-proofs " 
and holders of " life insurance policies." 

Nor were the petty clerkships the only 
positions which brought odium upon their 
incumbents. If an able-bodied man ac- 
cepted even a seat in Congress, he did so 
at peril of his reputation for patriotism and 
courage, and very many of the men whose 
wisdom was most needed in that body 
positively refused to go there at the risk 
of losing a chance to be present with their 
regiments in battle. Under the circum- 
stances, no great degree of strength or wis- 
dom was to be looked for at the hands of 



Red Tape. 199 

Congress, and certainly that assemblage of 
gentlemen has never been suspected of 
showing much of either ; while the admin- 
istrative machinery presided over by the 
small officials and clerks who crowded 
Richmond was at once a wonder of compli- 
cation and a marvel of inefficiency. 

But, if we may believe the testimony of 
those who were in position to know the 
facts, the grand master of incapacity, whose 
hand was felt everywhere, was President 
Davis himself. Not content with perpetu- 
ally meddling in the smallest matters of 
detail, and prescribing the petty routine of 
office work in the bureaii, he interfered, 
either directly or through his personal sub- 
ordinates, with military operations which 
no man, not present with the army, could 
be competent to control, and which he, 
probably, was incapable of justly compre- 
hending in any case. With the history of 
his quarrels with the generals in the field, 
and the paralyzing effect they had upon 



200 A Rebel's Recollections, 

military operations, the public is already 
familiar. Leaving things of that nature to 
the historian, I confine myself to smaller 
matters, my purpose being merely to give 
the reader an idea of the experiences of a 
Confederate soldier, and to show him Con- 
federate affairs as they looked when seen 
from the inside. 

I can hardly hope to make the ex-soldier 
of the Union understand fully how we on 
the other side were fed in the field. He 
fought and marched with a skilled commis- 
sariat at his back, and, for his further staff 
of comiort, had the Christian and Sanitary 
commissions, whose handy tin cups and 
other camp conveniences came to us only 
through the uncertain and irregular channel 
of abandonment and capture ; and unless 
his imagination be a vivid one, he will not 
easily conceive the state of our commis- 
sariat or the privations we suffered as a 
consequence of its singularly bad manage- 
ment. The first trouble was, that we had 



Red Tape. 201 

for a commissary-general a crotchety doc- 
tor, some of whose acquaintances had for 
\ years beUeved him insane. Aside from 
his suspected mental aberration, and the 
crotchets which had made his life already 
a failure, he knew nothing whatever of the 
business belonging to the department un- 
der his control, his whole military experi- 
ence having consisted of a few years' serv- 
ice as a lieutenant of cavalry in one of the 
Territories, many years before the date of 
his appointment as chief of subsistence in 
the Confederafcy. Wholly without experi- 
ence to guide him, he was forced to evolve 
from his own badly balanced intellect what- 
ever system he should adopt, and from the 
beginning of the war until the early part 
of the year 1865, the Confederate armies 
were forced to lean upon this broken reed 
in the all-important matter of a food supply. 
The generals commanding in the field^ we 
are told on the very highest authority, 
protested, suggested, remonstrated almost 



202 A RebeVs Recollections. 

daily, but their remonstrances were un- 
heeded and their suggestions set at naught. 
At Manassas, where the army was well- 
nigh starved out in the very beginning of 
the war,- food might have been abundant 
but for the obstinacy of this one man. On 
our left lay a country unsurpassed, and al- 
most unequaled, in productiveness. It was 
rich in grain and meat, these being its 
special products. A railroad, with, next to 
nothing to do, penetrated it, and its stores 
of food were nearly certain to be exposed 
to the enemy before any other part of the 
country should be conquered. The obvious 
duty of the commissary-general, therefore, 
was to draw upon that section for the 
suppHes which were both convenient and 
abundant. The chief of subsistence ruled 
otherwise, however, thinking it better to 
let that source of supply lie exposed to the 
first advance of the enemy, while he drew 
upon the Richmond depots for a daily 
ration, and shipped it by the overtasked 



Red Tape, 203 

line of railway leading from the capital to 
Manassas. It was nothing to him that he 
was thus exhausting the rear and crippling 
the resources of the country for the future. 
It was nothing to him that in the midst of 
plenty the army was upon a short allow- 
ance of food. It was nothing that the ship- 
ments of provisions from Richmond by this 
railroad seriously interfered with other im- 
portant interests. System was everything, 
and this was a part of his system. The 
worst of it was, that in this all-important 
branch of the service experience and or- 
ganization wrought little if any improve- 
ment as the war went on, so that as the 
supplies and the means of transportation 
grew smaller, the undiminished inefficiency 
of the department produced disastrous re- 
sults. The army, suffering for food, was 
disheartened by the thought that the scar- 
city was due to the exhaustion of the coun- 
try's resources. Red tape was supreme, 
and no sword was permitted to cut it. I 



204 A Rebel's Recollections. 

remember one little circumstance, which 
will serve to illustrate the absoluteness 
with which system was suffered to override 
sense in the administration of the affairs 
of the subsistence department. I served 
for a time on the coast of South Carohna, 
a country which produces rice in great 
abundance, and in which fresh pork and 
mutton might then be had almost for the 
asking, while the climate is wholly unsuited 
to the making of flour or bacon. Just at 
that time, however, the officials of the com- 
missary department saw fit to feed the 
whole army on bacon and flour, articles 
which, if given to troops in that quarter of 
the country at all, must be brought several 
hundred miles by rail. The local commis- 
sary officers made various suggestions look- 
ing to the use of the provisions of which the 
country round about was full, but, so far as 
I could learn, no attention whatever was 
paid to them. At the request of one of 
these post commissaries, I wrote an elabo- 



Red Tape, 205 

rate and respectful letter on the subject, 
setting forth the fact that rice, sweet po- 
tatoes, corn meal, hominy, grits, mutton, 
and pork existed in great abundance in the 
immediate neighborhood of the troops, and 
could be bought for less than one third the 
cost of the flour and bacon we were eating. 
The letter was signed by the post com- 
missary, and forwarded through the regular 
channels, with the most favorable indorse- 
ments possible, but it resulted in nothing. 
The department presently found it impossi- 
ble to give us full rations of bacon and 
flour, but it still refused to think of the 
remedy suggested. It cut down the ration 
instead, thus reducing the men to a state 
of semi-starvation in a country full of food. 
Relief came at last in the shape of a tech- 
nicality, else it would not have been allowed 
to come at all. A vigilant captain dis- 
covered that the men were entitled by law 
to commutation in money for their rations, 
at fixed rates, and acting upon this the men 



2o6 A Rebel s Recollections, 

were able to buy, with the money paid them 
in heu of rations, an abundance of fresh 
meats and vegetables ; and most of the 
companies managed at the same time to 
save a considerable fund for future use out 
of the surplus, so great was the disparity 
between the cost of the food they bought 
and that which the government wished to 
furnish them. 

The indirect effect of all this stupidity — 
for it can be called by no softer name — 
was almost as bad as its direct results. The 
people at home, finding that the men in the 
field were suffering for food, undertook to 
assist in supplying them. With character- 
istic profusion they packed boxes and sent 
them to their soldier friends and acquaint- 
ances, particularly during the first year of 
the war. Sometimes these supplies were 
permitted to reach their destination, and 
sometimes they were allowed to decay in a 
depot because of some failure on the part 
of the sender to comply with the mysteri- 



Red Tape, 207 

ous canons of official etiquette. In either 
case they were wasted. If they got to the 
army they were used wastefully by the 
men, who could not carry them and had no 
place of storage for them. If they were 
detained anywhere, they remained there 
until some change of front made it neces- 
sary to destroy them. There seemed to be 
nobody invested with sufficient authority 
to turn them to practical account, I re- 
member a box of my own, packed with 
cooked meats, vegetables, fruits, — all per- 
ishable, — which got within three miles of 
my tent, but could get no farther, although 
I hired a farmer's wagon with which to 
bring it to camp, where my company was 
at that moment in sore need of its contents. 
There was some informality, — the officer 
having it in charge could not tell me what, 
— about the box itself, or its transmission, 
or its arrival, or something else, and so it 
could not be delivered to me, though I had 
the warrant of my colonel in writing, for 



2o8 A Rebel's Recollections, 

receiving it. Dismissing my wagoner, I 
told the officer in charge that the contents 
of the box were of a perishable character, 
and that rather than have them wasted, I 
should be glad to have him accept the 
whole as a present to his mess ; but he 
declined, on the ground that to accept the 
present would be a gross irregularity so 
long as there was an embargo upon the 
package. I received the box three months 
later, after its contents had become entirely 
worthless. Now this is but one of a hun- 
dred cases within my own knowledge, and 
it will serve to show the reader how the 
inefficiency of the subsistence department 
led to a wasteful expenditure of those pri- 
vate stores of food which constituted our 
only reserve for the future. 

And there was never any improvement. 
From the beginning to the end of the war 
the commissariat was just sufficiently well 
managed to keep the troops in a state of 
.semi-starvation. On one occasion the com- 



Red Tape. 209 

pany of artillery to which I was attached 
lived for thirteen days, m zviiiter quarters^ 
on a daily dole of half a pound of corn meal 
per man, while food in abundance was 
stored within five miles of its camp — a 
railroad connecting the two points, and the 
wagons of the battery lying idle all the 
while. This happened because the subsist- 
ence department had not been ofHcially in- 
formed of our transfer from one battalion 
to another, though the fact of the transfer 
was under their eyes, and the order of the 
chief of artillery making it was offered them 
in evidence. These officers were not to 
blame. They knew the temper of their 
chief, and had been taught the omnipotence 
of routine. 

But it was in Richmond that routine 
was carried to its absurdest extremities. 
There, everything was done by rule except 
those things to which system of some sort 
would have been of advantage, and they 
were left at loose ends. Among other 
14 



2IO A RebeVs Recollections, 

things a provost system was devised and 
brought to perfection during the time of 
martial law. Having once tasted the 
sweets of despotic rule, its chief refused 
to resign any part of his absolute sov- 
ereignty over the city, even when the reign 
of martial law ceased by limitation of time. 
His system of guards and passports was a 
very marvel of annoying inefficiency. It 
effectually blocked the way of every man 
who was intent upon doing his duty, while 
it gave unconscious but sure protection to 
spies, blockade-runners, deserters, and ab- 
sentees without leave from the armies. It 
was omnipotent for the annoyance of sol- 
dier and citizen, but utterly worthless for 
any good purpose. If a soldier on furlough 
or even on detached duty arrived in Rich- 
mond, he was taken in charge by the pro- 
vost guards at the railway station, marched 
to the soldiers' home or some other vile 
prison house, and kept there in durance 
during the whole time of his stay. It mat- 



Red Tape, 211 

tered not how legitimate his papers were, 
or how evident his correctness of purpose. 
The system required that he should be 
locked up, and locked up he was, in every 
case, until one plucky fellow made fight by 
appeal to the courts, and so compelled the 
abandonment of a practice for which there 
was never any warrant in law or necessity 
in fact. 

Richmond being the railroad centre from 
which the various lines radiated, nearly 
every furloughed soldier and officer on 
leave was obliged to pass through the city, 
going home and returning. Now to any 
ordinary intelligence it would seem that a 
man bearing a full description of himself, 
and a furlough signed by his captain, 
colonel, brigadier, division-commander, heu- 
tenant-general, and finally by Robert E. 
Lee as general-in-chief, might have been 
allowed to go peaceably to his home by the 
nearest route. But that was no ordinary 
intelligence which ruled Richmond. Its 



212 A RebeVs Recollections, 

ability to find places in which to interfere 
was unlimited, and it decreed that no sol- 
dier should leave Richmond, either to go 
home or to return direct to the army, with- 
out a brown paper passport, signed by an 
officer appointed for that purpose, and 
countersigned by certain other persons 
whose authority to sign or countersign 
anything nobody was ever able to trace to 
its source. If any such precaution had 
been necessary, it would not have been so 
bad, or even being unnecessary, if there 
had been the slightest disposition on the 
part of these passport people to facilitate 
obedience to their own requirements, the 
long-suffering officers and men of the army 
would have uttered no word of complaint. 
But the facts were exactly the reverse. 
The passport officials rigidly maintained 
the integrity of their office hours, and nei- 
ther entreaty nor persuasion^ would induce 
them in any case to anticipate by a single 
minute the hour for beginning, or to post- 



Red Tape. 213 

pone the time of ending their daily duties. 
I stood one day in their office in a crowd 
of fellow soldiers and officers, some on fur- 
lough going home, some returning after a 
brief visit, and still others, like myself, go- 
ing from one place to another under orders 
and on duty. The two trains by which 
most of us had to go were both to leave 
within an hour, and if we should lose them 
we must remain twenty-four hours longer 
in Richmond, where the hotel rate was 
then sixty dollars a day. In full view of 
these facts, the passport men, daintily 
dressed, sat there behind their railing, 
chatting and laughing for a full hour, suf- 
fering both trains to depart and all these 
men to be left over rather than do thirty 
minutes' work in advance of the improp- 
erly fixed office hour. It resulted from this 
system that many men on three or five 
days' leave lost nearly the whole of it in 
delays, going and returning. Many others 
were kept in Richmond for want of a pass- 



214 ^ RebeVs Recollections. 

port until their furloughs expired, when 
they were arrested for absence without 
leave, kept three or four days in the guard- 
house, and then taken as prisoners to their 
commands, to which they had tried hard to 
go of their own motion at the proper time. 
Finally the abuse became so outrageous 
that General Lee, in his capacity of gen- 
eral-in- chief, issued a peremptory order for- 
bidding anybody to interfere in any way . 
with officers or soldiers traveling under his 
written authority. 

But the complications of the passport 
system, before the issuing of that order, 
were endless. I went once with a friend 
in search of passports. As I had passed 
through Richmond a few weeks before, I 
fancied I knew all about the business of 
getting the necessary papers. Armed with 
our furloughs we went straight from the 
train to the passport office, and presenting 
our papers to the young man in charge, we 
asked for the brown paper permits which 



Red Tape, 215 

we must show upon leaving town. The 
young man prepared them and gave them 
to us, but this was no longer the end of the 
matter. These passports must be counter- 
signed, and, strangely enough, my friend's 
required the sign-manual of Lieutenant X., 
whose office was in the lower part of the 
city, while mine must be signed by Lieu- 
tenant Y., who made his head-quarters 
some distance farther up town. As my 
friend and I were of precisely the same 
rank, came from the same command, were 
going to the same place, and held furloughs 
in exactly the same words, I shall not be 
deemed unreasonable when I declare my 
conviction that no imbecility, less fully de- 
veloped than that which then governed 
Richmond, could possibly have discovered 
any reason for requiring that our passports 
should be countersigned by different peo- 
ple. 

But with all the trouble it gave to men 
intent upon doing their duty, this cumbrous 



2i6 A RebeVs Recollectio7is. 

passport system was well-nigh worthless 
for any of the purposes whose accomplish- 
ment might have excused its existence. 
Indeed, in some cases it served to assist 
the very people it was intended to arrest. 
In one instance within my own knowledge, 
a soldier who wished to visit his home, 
some hundreds of miles away, failing to 
get a furlough, shouldered his musket and 
set out with no scrip for his "journey, de- 
pending upon his familiarity with the pass- 
port system for the accomplishment of his 
purpose. Going to a railroad station, he 
planted himself at one of the entrances as 
a sentinel, and proceeded to demand pass- 
ports of every comer. Then he got upon 
the train, and between stations he passed 
through the cars, again inspecting people's 
traveling papers. Nobody was surprised 
at the performance. It was not at all an 
unusual thing for a sentinel to go out with 
a train in this way, and nobody doubted 
that the man had been sent upon this 
errand. 



Red Tape, 217 

On another occasion two officers of my 
acquaintance were going from a southern 
post to Virginia on some temporary duty, 
and in their orders there was a clause 
directing them to " arrest and lodge in the 
nearest guard-house or jail " all soldiers 
they might encounter who were absent 
without leave from their commands. As 
the train upon which they traveled ap- 
proached Weldon, N. C, a trio of guards 
passed through the cars, inspecting pass- 
ports. This was the third inspection in- 
flicted upon the passengers within a few 
hours, and, weary of it, one of the two 
officers met the demand for his passport 
with a counter demand for the guards' 
authority to examine it. The poor fellows 
were there honestly enough, doubtless, do- 
ing a duty which was certainly not alto- 
gether pleasant, but they had been sent out 
on their mission with no attendant officer, 
and no scrap of paper to attest their au- 
thority, or even to avouch their right to be 



2i8 A RebeVs Recollections. 

on the train at all ; wherefore the journey- 
ing officer, exhibiting his own orders, pro- 
ceeded to arrest them. Upon their arrival 
at Weldon, where their quarters were, he 
released them, but not without a lesson 
which provost guards in that vicinity re- 
'membered. I tell the story for the sake 
of showing how great a degree of laxity 
and carelessness prevailed in the depart- 
ment which was organized especially to 
enforce discipline by putting everybody un- 
der surveillance. 

But this was not all. In Richmond, 
v/here the passport system had its birth, 
and where its annoying requirements were 
most sternly enforced against people having 
a manifest right to travel, there were still 
o:reater abuses. Will the reader believe 
that while soldiers, provided with the very 
best possible evidence of their right to 
enter and leave Richmond, were badgered 
and delayed as I have explained, in the 
passport office, the bits of brown paper 



Red Tape. 219 

over which so great an ado was made might 
be, and were, bought and sold by dealers ? 
That such was the case I have the very 
best evidence, namely, that of my own 
senses. If the system was worth anything 
at all, if it was designed to accomplish any 
worthy end, its function was to prevent the 
escape of spies, blockade-runners, and de- 
serters ; and yet these were precisely the 
people who were least annoyed by it. By 
a system of logic peculiar to themselves, 
the provost marshal's people seem to have 
arrived at the conclusion that men desert- 
ing the army, acting as spies, or " running 
the blockade" to the North, were to be 
found only in Confederate uniforms, and 
against men wearing these the efforts of 
the department were especially directed. 
Non-military men had little difficulty in 
getting passports at will, and failing this 
there were brokers' shops in which they 
could buy them at a comparatively small 
cost. I knew one case in which an army 



2 20 A Rebel's Recollections, 

officer in full uniform, hurrying through 
Richmond before the expiration of his 
leave, in order that he might be with his 
command in a battle then impending, was 
ordered about from one official to another 
in a vain search for the necessary passport, 
until he became discouraged and impatient. 
He finally went in despair to a Jew, and 
bought an illicit permit to go to his post 
of duty. 

But even as against soldiers, except those 
who were manifestly entitled to visit Rich- 
mond, the system was by no means effect- 
ive. More than one deserter, to my own 
knowledge, passed through Richmond in 
full uniform, though by what means they 
avoided arrest, when there were guards and 
passport inspectors at nearly every corner, 
I cannot guess. 

At one time, when General Stuart, with 
his cavalry, was encamped within a few 
miles of the city, he discovered that his 
men were visiting Richmond by dozens, 



Red Tape, 221 

without leave, which, for some reason or 
other known only to the provost marshal's 
office, they were able to do without moles- 
tation. General Stuart, finding that this 
was the case, resolved to take the matter 
into his own hands, and accordingly with 
a troop of cavalry he made a descent upon 
the theatre one night, and arrested those 
of his men whom he found there. The 
provost marshal, who it would seem was 
more deeply concerned for the preservation 
of his own dignity than for the maintenance 
of discipline, sent a message to the great 
cavalier, threatening him with arrest if he 
should again presume to enter Richmond 
for the purpose of making arrests. Noth- 
ing could have pleased Stuart better. He 
replied that he should visit Richmond again 
the next night, with thirty horsemen ; that 
he should patrol the streets in search of 
absentees from his command ; and that 
General Winder might arrest him if he 
could. The jingling of spurs was loud in 



222 A Rebel's Recollections. 

the streets that night, but the provost mar- 
shal made no attempt to arrest the defiant 
horseman. 

Throughout the management of affairs 
in Richmond a cumbrous inefficiency was 
everywhere manifest. From the president, 
who insulted his premier for presuming to 
offer some advice about the conduct of the 
war, and quarreled with his generals be- 
cause they failed to see the wisdom of a 
military movement suggested by himself, 
down to the pettiest clerk in a bureau, 
there was everywhere a morbid sensitive- 
ness on the subject of personal dignity, 
and an exaggerated regard for routine, 
which seriously impaired the efficiency of 
the government and greatly annoyed the 
arm3^ Under all the circumstances the 
reader will not be surprised to learn that 
the government at Richmond was by no 
means idolized by the men in the field. 

The wretchedness of its management 
began to bear fruit early in the war, and 



Red Tcipe, 223 

the fruit was bitter in the mouths of the 
soldiers. Mr. Davis's evident hostihty to 
Generals Beauregard and Johnston, which 
showed itself in his persistent refusal to let 
them concentrate their men, in his obsti- 
nate thwarting of all their plans, and in his 
interference with the details of army organ- 
ization on which they were agreed, — a 
hostihty born, as General Thomas Jordan 
gives us to understand, of their failure to 
see the wisdom of his plan of campaign 
after Bull Run, which was to take the army 
across the lower Potomac at a point where 
it. could never hope to recross, for the pur- 
pose of capturing a small force lying there 
under General Sickles, — was not easily 
concealed ; and the army was too intelli- 
gent not to know that a meddlesome and 
dictatorial president, on bad terms with his 
generals in the field, and bent upon thwart- 
ing their plans, was a very heavy load to 
carry. The generals held their peace, as a 
matter of course, but the principal facts 



2 24 A Rebel's Recollections, 

were well known to officers and men, and 
when the time came, in the fall of 1861, for 
the election of a president under the per- 
manent constitution (Mr. Davis having held 
office provisionally only, up to that time), 
there was a very decided disposition on the 
part of the troops to vote against him. 
They were told, however, that as there was 
no candidate opposed to him, he must be 
elected at any rate, and that the moral ef- 
fect of showing a divided front to the en- 
emy would be very bad indeed ; and in this 
way only was the undivided vote of the 
army secured for him. The troops voted 
for Mr. Davis thus under stress of circum- 
stances, in the hope that all would yet be 
well ; but his subsequent course was not 
calculated to reinstate him in their confi- 
dence, and the wish that General Lee 
might see fit to usurp all the powers of 
government was a commonly expressed 
one, both in the army and in private life, 
during the last two years of the war. 



/ 

Red Tape, 225 

The favoritism which governed nearly 
every one of the president's appointments 
was the leading, though not the only, 
ground of complaint. And truly the army 
had reason to murmur, when one of the 
president's pets was promoted all the way 
from lieutenant-colonel to lieutenant-gen- 
eral, having been but once in battle, — and 
then only constructively so, — on his way 
up, while colonels by the hundred, and 
brigadier and major generals by the score, 
who had been fighting hard and success- 
fully all the time, were left as they were. 
And when this suddenly created general, 
almost without a show of resistance, sur- 
rendered one of the most important strong- 
holds in the country, together with a vet- 
eran army of considerable size, is it any 
wonder that we questioned the wisdom of 
the president whose blind favoritism had 
dealt the cause so severe a blow ? But not 
content with this, as soon as the surren- 
dered general was exchanged the president 
15 



2 26 A RebeVs Recollections, 

tried to place him in command of the de- 
fenses of Richmond, then hard pressed by 
General Grant, and was only prevented 
from doing so by the man's own discovery 
that the troops would not willingly serve 
under him. 

The extent to which presidential par- 
tiality and presidential intermeddhng with 
affairs in the field were carried may be 
guessed, perhaps, from the fact that the 
Richmond Examiner, the newspaper which 
most truly reflected the sentiment of the 
people, found consolation for the loss 
of Vicksburg and New Orleans in the 
thought that the consequent cutting of the 
Confederacy in two freed the trans-Missis- 
sippi armies from paralyzing dictation. In 
its leading article for October 5, 1864, the 
Examiner said : — 

" The fall of New Orleans and the sur- 
render of Vicksburg proved blessings to 
the cause beyond the Mississippi. It ter- 
minated the regime of pet generals. It put 



Red Tape, 227 

a stop to official piddling in the conduct of 
the armies and the plan of campaigns. 
The moment when it became impossible to 
send orders by telegraph to court officers, 
at the head of troops who despised them, 
was the moment of the turning tide." 

So marked was the popular discontent, 
not with Mr. Davis only, but with the en- 
tire government and Congress as well, that 
a Richmond newspaper at one time dared 
to suggest a counter revolution as the only 
means left of saving the cause from the 
strangling it was receiving at the hands of 
its guardians in Richmond. And the sug- 
gestion seemed so very reasonable and 
timely that it startled nobody, except per- 
haps a congressman or two who had no 
stomach for field service. 

The approach of the end wrought no 
change in the temper of the government, 
and one of its last acts puts in the strong- 
est light its disposition to sacrifice the in- 
terests of the army to the convenience of 



/ 

2 28 A Rebel's Recollections. 

the court. When the evacuation of Rich- 
mond was begun, a train load of provisions 
was sent by General Lee's order from one 
of the interior depots to Amelia Court 
House, for the use of the retreating army, 
which was without food and must march to 
that point before it could receive a supply. 
But the president and his followers were in 
haste to leave the capital, and needed the 
train, wherefore it was not allowed to re- 
main at Amelia Court House long enough 
to be unloaded, but was hurried on to Rich- 
mond, where its cargo was thrown out to 
facilitate the flight of the president and his 
personal followers, while the starving army 
was left to suffer in an utterly exhausted 
country, with no source of supply anywhere 
within its reach. The surrender of the 
army was already inevitable, it is true, but 
that fact in no way justified this last, crown- 
ing act of selfishness and cruelty. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE END, AND AFTER. 

It is impossible to say precisely when 
the conviction became general in the South 
that we were to be beaten. I cannot even 
decide at what time I myself began to 
think the cause a hopeless one, and I have 
never yet found one of my fellow-Confed- 
erates, though I have questioned many of 
them, who could tell me with any degree of 
certainty the history of his change from 
confidence to despondency. We schooled 
ourselves from the first to think that we 
should ultimately win, and the habit of 
thinking so was too strong to be easily 
broken by adverse happenings. Having 
undertaken to make good our declaration 
of independence, we refused to admit, even 
to ourselves, the possibility of failure. It 



230 A Rebel's Recollections, 

was a part of our soldierly and patriotic 
duty to believe that ultimate success was 
to be ours, and Stuart only uttered the 
common thought of army and people, when 
he said, " We are bound to believe that, 
anyhow." We were convinced, beyond the 
possibility of a doubt, of the absolute right- 
eousness of our cause, and in spite of his- 
tory we persuaded ourselves that a people 
battling for the right could not fail in the 
end. And so our hearts went on hoping 
for success long after our heads had learned 
to expect failure. Besides all this, we 
never gave verbal expression to the doubts 
we felt, or even to the longing, which must 
have been universal, for the end. It was 
our religion to believe in the triumph of 
our cause, and it was heresy of the rankest 
sort to doubt it or even to admit the possi- 
bility of failure. It was ours to fight on 
indefinitely, and to the future belonged the 
award of victory to our arms. We did not 
allow ourselves even the poor privilege of 



The End, and After. 231 

wishing that the struggle might end, ex- 
cept as we coupled the wish with a pro- 
nounced confidence in our ability to make 
the end what we desired it to be. I re- 
member very well the stern rebuke admin- 
istered by an officer to as gallant a fellow 
as any in the army, who, in utter weariness 
and wretchedness, in the trenches at Spott- 
sylvania Court House, after a night of 
watching in a drenching rain, said that he 
hoped the campaign then opening might be 
the last one of the war. His plea that he 
also hoped the war would end as we de- 
sired availed him nothing. To be weary 
in the cause was offense enough, and the 
officer gave warning that another such ex- 
pression would subject the culprit to trial 
by court-martial. In this he only spoke 
the common mind. We had enlisted for 
the war, and a thought of weariness was 
hardly better than a wish for surrender. 
This was the temper in which we began 
the campaign of i Z6^, and so far as I have 



232 A RebeVs Recollections. 

been able to discover, it underwent little 
change afterwards. Even during the final 
retreat, though there were many desertions 
soon after Richmond was left behind, not 
one of us who remained despaired of the 
end we sought. We discussed the compar- 
ative strategic merits of the line we had 
left and the new one we hoped to make 
on the Roanoke River, and we wondered 
where the seat of government would be, 
but not one word was said about a proba- 
ble or possible surrender. Nor was the 
army alone in this. The people who were 
being left behind were confident that they 
should see us again shortly, on our way to 
Richmond's recapture. 

Up to the hour of the evacuation of 
Richmond, the newspapers were as con- 
fident as ever of victory. During the fall 
of 1864 they even believed, or professed to 
believe, that our triumph w^as already at 
hand. The Richmond Whig of October 5, 
1864, said: "That the present condition 



The End, and After. 233 

of affairs, compared with that of any pre- 
vious year at the same season, at least 
since 1861, is greatly in our favor, we think 
can hardly be denied." In the same arti- 
cle it said : " That General Lee can keep 
Grant out of Richmond from this time 
until doomsday, if he should be tempted to 
keep up the trial so long, we are as con- 
fident as we can be of anything whatever." 
The Examiner of September 24, 1864, said 
in its leading editorial : " The final strug- 
gle for the possession of Richmond and of 
Virginia is now near. This war draws to a 
close. If Richmond is held by the South 
till the first of November it will be ours 
forever more ; for the North will never 
throw another huge army into the abyss 
where so many lie ; and the war will con- 
clude, beyond a doubt, with the independ- 
ence of the Southern States." In its issue 
for October 7, 1864, the same paper began 
its principal editorial article with this para- 
graph : " One month of spirit and energy 



2 34 ^ Rebel's Recollections, 

now, and the campaign is over, and the war 
is over. We do not mean that if the year's 
campaign end favorably for us, McClellan 
will be elected as Yankee President. That 
may come, or may not come ; but no part 
of our chance for an honorable peace and 
independence rests upon that. Let who 
will be Yankee President, with the failure 
of Grant and Sherman this year, the war 
ends. And with Sherman's army already 
isolated and cut off in Georgia, and Grant 
unable either to take or besiege Richmond, 
we have only to make one month's exertion 
in improving our advantages, and then it 
may safely be said that the fourth year's 
campaign, and with it the war itself, is one 
gigantic failure." The Richmond Whig of 
September 8, 1864, with great gravity 
copied from the Wytheville Dispatch an 
article beginning as follows : " Believing 
as we do that the war of subjugation is 
virtually over, we deem it not improper to 
make a few suo-orestions relative to the 



The End, and After. 235 

treatment of Yankees after the war is over. 
Our soldiers know how to treat them now, 
but then a different treatment will be nec- 
essary." And so they talked all the time. 
Much of this was mere whistling to keep 
our courage up, of course, but we tried 
very hard to believe all these pleasant 
things, and in a measure we succeeded. 
And yet I think we must have known from 
the beginning of the campaign of 1864 that 
the end was approaching, and that it could 
not be other than a disastrous one. We 
knew very well that General Lee's army 
was smaller than it ever had been before. 
We knew, too, that there were no reinforce- 
ments to be had from any source. The 
conscription had put every man worth 
counting into the field already, and the lit- 
tle army that met General Grant in the 
Wilderness represented all that remained 
of the Confederate strength in Virginia. 
In the South matters were at their worst, 
and we knew that not a man could come 



236 A Rebel's Recollections. 

thence to our assistance. Lee mustered a 
total strength of about sixty-six thousand 
men, when we marched out of winter quar- 
ters and began in the Wilderness that long 
struggle which ended nearly a year later at 
Appomattox. With that army alone the 
war was to be fought out, and we had to 
shut our eyes to facts very resolutely, that 
we might not see how certainly we were to 
be crushed. And we did shut our eyes so 
successfully as to hope in a vague, irra- 
tional way, for the impossible, to the very 
end. In the Wilderness we held our own 
against every assault, and the visible pun- 
ishment we inflicted upon the foe was so 
great that hardly any man in our army ex- 
pected to see a Federal force on our side 
of the river at daybreak next morning. 
We thought that General Grant was as 
badly hurt as Hooker had been on the 
same field, and confidently expected him to 
retreat during the night. When he moved 
by his left flank to Spottsylvania instead, 



The End, and After, 237 

we understood what manner of man he 
was, and knew that the persistent pound- 
ing, which of all things we were least able 
to endure, had begun. When at last we 
settled down in the trenches around Peters- 
burg, we ought to have known that the 
end was rapidly drawing near. We con- 
gratulated ourselves instead upon the fact 
that we had inflicted a heavier loss than 
we had suffered, and buckled on our armor 
anew. 

If General Grant had failed to break our 
power of resistance by his sledge-hammer 
blows, it speedily became evident that he 
would be more successful in wearing it 
away by the constant friction of a siege. 
Without fighting a battle he was literally 
destroying our army. The sharp-shooting 
was incessant, and the bombardment hardly 
less so, and under it all our numbers visibly 
decreased day by day. During the first 
two months of the siege my own company, 
which numbered about a hundred and fifty 



238 A RebeTs Recollections, 

men, lost sixty, in killed and wounded, an 
average of a man a day, and while our list 
of casualties was greater than that of many 
other commands, there were undoubtedly 
some companies and regiments which suf- 
fered more than we. The reader will read- 
ily understand that an army already weak- 
ened by years of war, with no source from 
which to recruit its ranks, could not stand 
this daily waste for any great length of 
time. We were in a state of atrophy for 
which there was no remedy except that of 
freeing the negroes and making soldiers of 
them, which Congress was altogether too 
loftily sentimental to think of for a mo- 
ment. 

There was no longer any room for hope 
except in a superstitious belief that Provi- 
dence would in some way interfere in our 
behalf, and to that very many betook them- 
selves for comfort. This shifting upon a 
supernatural power the task we had failed 
to accomplish by human means rapidly 



The End, and After, 239 

bred many less worthy superstitions among 
the troops. The general despondency, 
which amounted almost to despair, doubt- 
less helped to bring about this result, and 
the great religious '' revival " contributed to 
it in no small degree. I think hardly any 
man in that army entertained a thought of 
coming out of the struggle alive. The only 
question with each was when his time was 
to come, and a sort of gloomy fatalism took 
possession of many minds. Beheving that 
they must be killed sooner or later, and 
that the hour and the manner of their 
deaths were unalterably fixed, many became 
singularly reckless, and exposed themselves 
with the utmost carelessness to all sorts of 
unnecessary dangers. 

" I 'm going to be killed pretty soon,"' 
said as brave a man as I ever knew, to me 
one evening. " I never flinched from a 
bullet until to-day, and now I dodge every 
time one whistles within twenty feet of 
me." 



240 A Rebel's Recollections, 

I tried to persuade him out of the belief, 
and even got for him a dose of valerian 
with which to quiet his nerves. He took 
the medicine, but assured me that he was 
not nervous in the least. 

" My time is coming, that 's all," he said ; 
"and I don't care. A few days more or 
less don't signify much." An hour later 
the poor fellow's head was blown from his 
shoulders as he stood by my side. 

One such incident — and there were 
many of them — served to confirm a super- 
stitious belief in presentiments which a 
hundred failures of fulfillment Avere unable 
to shake. Meantime the revival went on. 
Prayer-meetings were held in every tent. 
Testaments were in every hand, and a sort 
of religious ecstasy took possession of the 
army. The men had ceased to rely upon 
the skill of their leaders or the strength of 
our army for success, and not a few of 
them hoped now for a miraculous interpo- 
sition of supernatural power in our behalf. 



The End, and After, 241 

Men in this mood make the best of sol- 
diers, and at no time were the fighting 
quahties of the Southern army better than 
during the siege. Under such circum- 
stances men do not regard death, and even 
the failure of any effort they were called 
upon to make wrought no demoralization 
among troops who had persuaded them- 
selves that the Almighty held victory in 
store for them, and would give it them in 
due time. What cared they for the failure 
of mere human efforts, when they were 
persuaded that through such failures God 
was leading us to ultimate victory } Dis- 
aster seemed only to strengthen the faith 
of many. They saw in it a needed lesson 
in humility, and an additional reason for 
believing that God meant to bring about 
victory by his own and not by human 
strength. They did their soldierly duties 
perfectly. They held danger and fatigue 
alike in contempt. It was their duty as 
Christian men to obey orders without ques- 
16 * 



242 A Rebel's Recollections, 

tion, and they did so in the thought that to 
do otherwise was to sin. 

That the confidence bred of these things 
should be of a gloomy kind was natural 
enough, and the gloom was not dispelled, 
certainly, by the conviction of every man 
that he was assisting at his own funeral. 
Failure, too, which was worse than death, 
was plainly inevitable in spite of it all. 
We persisted, as I have said, in vaguely 
hoping and trying to believe that success 
was still to be ours, and to that end we 
shut our eyes to the plainest facts, refusing 
to admit the truth which was everywhere 
evident, namely, that our efforts had failed, 
and that our cause was already in its death 
struggles. But we must have known all 
this, nevertheless, and our diligent cultiva- 
tion of an unreasonable hojoefulness served 
in no sensible degree to raise our spirits. 

Even positive knowledge does not always 
bring belief. I doubt if a condemned man, 
who finds himself in full bodily health, ever 



The E7td, and After. 243 

quite believes that he is to die within the 
hour, however certainly he may know the 
fact ; and our condition was not unlike that 
of condemned men. 

When at last the beginning of the end 
came, in the evacuation of Richmond and 
the effort to retreat, everything seemed to go 
to pieces at once. The best disciplinarians 
in the army relaxed their reins. The best 
troops became disorganized, and hardly any 
command marched in a body. Companies 
were mixed together, parts of each being 
separated by detachments of others. Fly- 
ing citizens in vehicles of every conceivable 
sort accompanied and embarrassed the col- 
umns. Many commands marched heed- 
lessly on without orders, and seemingly 
without a thought of whither they were go- 
ing. Others mistook the meaning of their 
orders, and still others had instructions 
which it was impossible to obey in any 
case. At Amelia Court House we should 
have found a supply of provisions. Gen- 



244 -^ RebeVs Recollectio7ts. 

eral Lee had ordered a train load to meet 
him there, but, as I have stated in a previ- 
ous chapter, the interests of the starving 
army had been sacrificed to the convenience 
or the cowardice of the president and his 
personal following. The train had been hur- 
ried on to Richmond and its precious cargo 
of food thrown out there, in order that Mr. 
Davis and his people might retreat rapidly 
and comfortably from the abandoned capi- 
tal. Then began the desertion of which we 
have heard so much. Up to that time, as 
far as I can learn, if desertions had occurred 
at all they had not become general ; but 
now that the government, in flying from 
the foe, had cut off our only supply of pro- 
visions, what were the men to do .'* Many 
of them wandered off in search of food, 
with no thought of deserting at all. Many 
others followed the example of the govern- 
ment, and fled ; but a singularly large pro- 
portion of the little whole stayed and 
starved to the last. And it was no tech- 



The End^ and After. 245 

nical or metaphorical starvation which we 
had to endure, either, as a brief statement 
of my own experience will show. The bat- 
tery to which I was attached was captured 
near Amelia Court House, and within a 
mile or two of my home. Seven men only 
escaped, and as I knew intimately every- 
body in the neighborhood, I had no trouble 
in getting horses for these to ride. Apply- 
ing to General Lee in person for instruc- 
tions, I was ordered to march on, using my 
own judgment, and rendering what service 
I could in the event of a battle. In this in- 
dependent fashion I marched with much 
better chances than most of the men had, 
to get food, and yet during three days and 
nights our total supply consisted of one ear 
of corn to the man, and we divided that 
with our horses. 

The end came, technically, at Appomat- 
tox, but of the real difficulties of the war 
the end was not yet. The trials and the 
perils of utter disorganization were still to 



246 A Rebel's Recollections, 

be endured, and as the condition in which 
many parts of the South were left by the 
fall of the Confederate government was an 
anomalous one, some account of it seems 
necessary to the completeness of this nar- 
rative. 

Our principal danger was from the law- 
less bands of marauders who infested the 
country, and our greatest difficulty in deal- 
ing with them lay in the utter absence of 
constituted authority of any sort. Our 
country was full of highwaymen — not the 
picturesque highwaymen of whom fiction 
and questionable history tell us, those gal- 
lant, generous fellows whose purse-cutting 
proclivities seem mere peccadilloes in the 
midst of so many virtues ; not these, by 
any means, but plain highwaymen of the 
most brutal description possible, and desti- 
tute even of the merit of presenting a re- 
spectable appearance. They were simply 
the offscourings of the two armies and of 
the suddenly freed negro population, — de- 



The End^ and After. 247 

sorters from fighting* regiments on both 
sides, and negro desperadoes, who found 
common ground upon which to fraternize 
in their common depravity. They moved 
about in bands, from two to ten strong, cut- 
ting horses out of plows, plundering help- 
less people, and wantonly destroying valu- 
ables which they could not carry away. At 
the house of one of my friends where only 
ladies lived, a body of these men demanded 
dinner, which was given them. They then 
required the mistress of the mansion to fill 
their canteens with sorghum molasses, 
which they immediately proceeded to pour 
over the carpets and furniture of the parlor. 
Outrages were of every-day enactment, and 
there was no remedy. There was no State, 
county, or municipal government in exist- 
ence among us. We had no courts, no 
justices of the peace, no sheriffs, no officers 
of any kind invested with a shadow of au- 
thority, and there were not men enough in 
the community, at first, to resist the ma- 



248 A Rebel's Reeollections, 

rauders, comparatively few of the surren- 
dered soldiers having found their way home 
as yet Those districts in which the Fed- 
eral armies were stationed were peculiarly 
fortunate. The troops gave protection to 
the people, and the commandants of posts 
constituted a government able to enforce 
order, to which outraged or threatened peo- 
ple could appeal. But these favored sec- 
tions were only a small part of the whole. 
The troops were not distributed in de- 
tached bodies over the country, but were 
kept in considerable masses at strategic 
points, lest a guerrilla war should succeed 
regular hostilities ; and so the greater part 
of the country was left wholly without law, 
at a time when law was most imperatively 
needed. I mention this, not to the dis- 
credit of the victorious army or of its offi- 
cers. They could not wisely have done 
otherwise. If the disbanded Confederates 
had seen fit to inaugurate a partisan war- 
fare, as many of the Federal commanders 



The End, and After, 249 

believed they would, they could have an- 
noyed the army of occupation no little ; and 
so long as the temper of the country in this 
matter was unknown, it would have been in 
the last degree improper to station small 
bodies of troops in exposed situations. 
Common military prudence dictated the 
massing of the troops, and as soon as it be- 
came evident that we had no disposition to 
resist further, but were disposed rather to 
render such assistance as we could in re- 
storing and maintaining order, everything 
was done which could be done to protect 
us. It is with a good deal of pleasure that 
I bear witness to the uniform disposition 
shown by such Federal officers as I came 
in contact with at this time, to protect all 
quiet citizens, to restore order, and to for- 
ward the interests of the community they 
were called upon to govern. In one case I 
went with a fellow-Confederate to the head- 
quarters nearest me, — eighteen miles away, 
— and reported the doings of some maraud- 



250 A Rebel's Recollections, 

ers in my neighborhood, which had been 
especially outrageous. The general in 
command at once made a detail of cavalry 
and instructed its chief to go in pursuit of 
the highwaymen, and to bring them to 
him, dead or alive. They were captured, 
marched at a double-quick to the camp, and 
shot forthwith, by sentence of a drum-head 
court-martial, a proceeding which did more 
than almost anything else could have done, 
to intimidate other bands of a like kind. 
At another time I took to the same officer's 
camp a number of stolen horses which a 
party of us had managed to recapture from 
a sleeping band of desperadoes. Some of 
the horses we recognized as the property 
of our neighbors, some we did not know at 
all, and one or two were branded " C. S." 
and " U. S." The general promptly returned 
all the identified horses, and lent all the 
others to farmers in need of them. 

After a little time most of the ex-soldiers 
returned to their homes, and finding that 



The End^ and After. 251 

there were enough of us in the county in 
which I lived to exercise a much-needed 
pohce supervision if we had the necessary 
authority, we sent a committee of citizens 
to Richmond to report the facts to the gen- 
eral in command of the district. He re- 
ceived our committee very cordially, ex- 
pressed great pleasure in the discovery that 
citizens were anxious to maintain order 
until a reign of law could be restored, and 
granted us leave to organize ourselves into 
a military police, with officers acting under 
written authority from him ; to patrol the 
country ; to disarm all improper or sus- 
picious persons ; to arrest and turn over 
to the nearest provost marshal all wrong- 
doers, and generally to preserve order by 
armed surveillance. To this he attached 
but one condition, namely, that we should 
hold ourselves bound in honor to assist any 
United States officer who might require 
such service of us, in the suppression of 
guerrilla warfare. To this we were glad 



252 A Rebel's Recollections. 

enough to assent, as the thing we dreaded 
most at that time was the inauguration of 
a hopeless, irregular struggle, which would 
destroy the small chance left us of rebuild- 
ing our fortunes and restoring our wasted 
country to prosperity. We governed the 
county in which we lived, until the estab- 
lishment of a military post at the county 
seat relieved us of the task, and the permis- 
sion given us thus to stamp out lawlessness 
saved our people from the alternative of 
starvation or dependence upon the bounty 
of the government. It was seed-time, and 
without a vigorous maintenance of order 
our fields could not have been planted at 
all. 

It is difficult to comprehend, and impos- 
sible to describe, the state of uncertainty in 
which we lived at this time. We had sur- 
rendered at discretion, and had no way of 
discovering or even of guessing what terms 
were to be given us. We were cut off 
almost wholly from trustworthy news, and 



The End, and After, 253 

in the absence of papers were unable even 
to rest conjecture upon the expression of 
sentiment at the North. Rumors we had 
in plenty, but so many of them were clearly 
false that we were forced to reject them all 
as probably untrue. When we heard it 
confidently asserted that General Alex- 
ander had made a journey to Brazil and 
brought back a tempting offer to emigrants, 
knowing all the time that if he had gone he 
must have made the trip within the ex- 
traordinarily brief period of a few weeks, it 
was difficult to beheve other news which 
reached us through like channels, though 
much of it ultimately proved true. I think 
nobody in my neighborhood believed the 
rumor of Mr. Lincoln's assassination until 
it was confirmed by a Federal soldier whom 
I questioned upon the subject one day, a 
week or two after the event. When we 
knew that the rumor was true, we deemed 
it the worst news we had heard since the 
surrender. We distrusted President John- 



2 54 A RebeVs Recollections. 

son more than any one else. Regarding 
him as a renegade Southerner, we thought 
it probable that he would endeavor to prove 
his loyalty to the Union by extra severity 
to the South, and we confidently believed 
he would revoke the terms offered us 
in Mr. Lincoln's amnesty proclamation ; 
wherefore there was a general haste to take 
the oath and so to secure the benefit of the 
dead president's clemency before his suc- 
cessor should establish harsher conditions. 
We should have regarded Mr. Lincoln's 
death as a calamity, even if it had come 
about by natural means, and coming as it 
did through a crime committed in our 
name, it seemed doubly a disaster. 

With the history of the South during the 
period of reconstruction, all readers are 
familiar, and it is only the state of affairs 
between the time of the surrender and the 
beginning of the rebuilding, that I have 
tried to describe in this chapter. But the 
picture would be inexcusably incomplete 



The End, and After, 255 

without some mention of the negroes. 
Their behavior both during and after the 
war may well surprise anybody not ac- 
quainted with the character of the race. 
When the men of the South were nearly all 
in the army, the negroes were left in large 
bodies on the plantations with nobody to 
control them except the women and a few 
old or infirm men. They might have been 
insolent, insubordinate, and idle, if they 
had chosen. They might have gained 
their freedom by asserting it. They might 
have overturned the social and political 
fabric at any time, and they knew all this 
too. They were intelligent enough to know 
that there was no power on the plantations 
capable of resisting any movement they 
might choose to make. They did know, 
too, that the success of the Federal arms 
would give them freedom. The fact was 
talked about everywhere, and no effort was 
made to keep the knowledge of it from 
them. They knew that to assert their 



256 A RebeVs Recollections. 

freedom was to give immediate success to 
the Union cause. Most of them coveted 
freedom, too, as the heartiness with which 
they afterwards accepted it abundantly 
proves. And yet they remained quiet, 
faithful, and diligent throughout, very few 
of them giving trouble of any sort, even on 
plantations where only a few women re- 
mained to control them. The reason for 
all this must be sought in the negro char- 
acter, and we of the South, knov/ing that 
character thoroughly, trusted it implicitly. 
We left our homes and our helpless ones in 
the keeping of the Africans of our house- 
holds, without any hesitation whatever. 
We knew these faithful and affectionate 
people too well to fear that they would 
abuse such a trust. We concealed nothing 
from them, and they knew quite as well as 
we did the issues at stake in the war. 

The negro is constitutionally loyal to his 
obligations as he understands them, and his 
attachments, both local and personal, are 



The End, and After, 257 

uncommonly strong. He speedily forgets 
an injury, but never a kindness, and so he 
was not likely to rise in arms against the 
helpless women and children whom he had 
known intimately and loved almost rever- 
entially from childhood, however strongly 
he desired the freedom which such a rising 
would secure to him. It was a failure to 
appreciate these peculiarities of the negro 
character which led John Brown into the 
mistake that cost him his life. Nothing is 
plainer than that he miscalculated the diffi- 
culty of exciting the colored people to in- 
surrection. He went to Harper's Ferry, 
confident that when he should declare his 
purposes, the negroes would flock to his 
standard and speedily crown his effort with 
success. They remained quietly at work 
instead, many of them hoping, doubtless, 
that freedom for themselves and their fel- 
lows might somehow be wrought out, but 
they were wholly unwilling to make the 
necessary war upon the whites to whom 
17 



258 A Rebel's Recollections, 

they were attached by the strongest possi- 
ble bonds of affection. And so throughout 
the war they acted after their kind, waiting 
for the issue with the great, calm patience 
which is their most universal character- 
istic. 

When the war ended, leaving everything 
in confusion, the poor blacks hardly knew 
what to do, but upon the whole they acted 
with great modesty, much consideration for 
their masters, and singular wisdom. A few 
depraved ones took to bad courses at once, 
but their number was remarkably small. 
Some others, with visionary notions, betook 
themselves to the cities in search of easier 
and more profitable work than any they 
had ever done, and many of these suffered 
severely from want before they found em- 
ployment again. The great majority waited 
patiently for things to adjust themselves in 
their new conditions, going on with their 
work meanwhile, and conducting them- 
selves with remarkable modesty. I saw 



The End^ and After, 259 

much of them at this time, and I heard of 
no case in which a negro vokmtarily re- 
minded his master of the changed relations 
existing between them, or in any other way 
offended against the strictest rules of pro- 
priety. 

At my own home the master of the man- 
sion assembled his negroes immediately 
after the surrender ; told them they were 
free, and under no obligation whatever to 
work for him ; and explained to them the 
difficulty he found in deciding what kind 
of terms he ought to offer them, inasmuch 
as he was wholly ignorant upon the subject 
of the wages of agricultural laborers. He 
told them, however, that if they wished to 
go on with the crop, he would give them 
provisions and clothing as before, and at 
the end of the year would pay them as high 
a rate of wages as any paid in the neigh- 
borhood. To this every negro on the place 
agreed, all of them protesting that they 
wanted no better terms than for their mas- 



26o A Rebel's Recollections, 

ter to give them at the end of the year 
whatever he thought they had earned. 
They lost not an hour from their work, 
and the hfe upon the plantation underwent 
no change whatever until its master was 
forced by a pressure of debt to sell his land. 
I give the history of the adjustment on this 
plantation as a fair example of the way in 
which ex-masters and ex-slaves were dis- 
posed to deal with each other. 

There were cases in which no such har- 
monious adjustment could be effected, but, 
so far as my observation extended, these 
were exceptions to the common rule, and 
even now, after a lapse of nine years, a very 
large proportion of the negroes remain, 
either as hired laborers or as renters 6f 
small farms, on the plantations on which 
they were born. 














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